[Pants-of-dog]

https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/5 ... preach.pdf

Abstract

A meta-analytic review of past research evaluated the link between religiosity and racism in the United States since the Civil Rights Act. Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources. In addition, religious racism is tied to basic life values of social conformity and respect for tradition. In support, individuals who were religious for reasons of conformity and tradition expressed racism that declined in recent years with the decreased societal acceptance of overt racial discrimination.The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in- group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.

In contrast, Putnam finds (in his now infamous paper about ethnic diversity and social cohesion) that the loss of social cohesion associated with ethnic diversity is nullified in religious groups that have ethnic diversity. This indicates that religion tends to get rid of racism within the in group, even if it reinforces it with out groups.

[XogGyux]

What on earth are you talking about? I have not accepted anything and your backtracking is very concerning. Look mate, clearly you will not stand by anything you say ever, so this whole thing is pointless.

In reply to theologians you said:



In reply to theology you said:

Notice the clear absence of any kind of quote saying that theology is wrong, useless or anything that you have pointed out. In a conversation, people don't simply reply to words, we reply to points or ideas. When you originally posted:

RT your efforts to have an intellectual conversation here are clearly in vain. The dismissal of theology and ontology should tell you everything you need to know about the extent of intellectual discourse, utterly oblivious to the fact that universities came into being particularly for the study of theology first and foremost.

I understood it to mean that you thought that religion was the cause that sparked the systematic pursuit and investigation of knowledge (scientific method). An argument that has been brought in previous occasions in many different disguises (e.g. enlightenment, etc). And that is what my argument was counterarguing. By showing that you can occasionally end up with good thing even though the spark is misguided.
Similar points to what I express here:

► Show Spoiler

If you want to have an honest discussion stop with the knee jerk reactions because otherwise, we will keep discussing in circles. I gave you a very specific example, Alchemy (there are more) which has nothing to do with theology, and this was an example of theology.

I am sure if you didn't have a chip on your shoulder or something to prove you would have caught my actual point rather, but just in case it was not clear I'll make it further clear.

Regardless of religious beliefs, ancient people had primitive and rudimentary minimal understanding of their surrounding world. Their tools to do anything related to the acquisition, analysis, and expansion of knowledge were at it's infancy and thus there were plenty of silly, erroneous, irrational and illogical "theories" (and I use "theory" in this sense in the colloquial meaning of the word, and not in it's scientific meaning) about the word. Some of these "theories" were in what we call the realm of science (aka Alchemy, or Darwin's theory of Pangenesis both of which represent a wrong understanding of the surrounding world). In a sense, we are also primitives if we were to compare ourselves to a civilization 5 thousand years into the future.

The whole point is that any type of superstition/wrong assertions about the word/wrong beliefs/et can serve as a launchpad for further investigation and trigger the beginning of a larger inquisitive and systematic search for the truth, knowing that ultimately could be beneficial. This in no way, shape or form supports the notion that the actual superstitions or wrong assessments/beliefs are beneficial and/or needed for the continuation of the emerging system.
For instance, many of the pre-Columbian civilizations had their own religions and had a unique approach to what we now understand as the field of Astronomy. By many accounts, their understanding was as great if not greater than the other contemporary civilizations of their time. Today we have a far more robust field of Astronomy, what Mayan, Aztecs or Incas might have had was certainly primitive in comparison and yet important. More importantly, we do not need (or have) a culture that celebrates pre-columbian religions and myths in order to preserve the history of this particular field or science or its integrity. Exact examples can also be taken from ancient Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Roman cultures in which we kept the valuable objective assessment and slowly discarded the myth associated with their cultures. We study some of these myths in order to have an accurate representation of what they USED to be but we do not need them per se.

and here:

► Show Spoiler

You seemed to be making an argument for the value on religion on sparking scientific methodology. I was simply illustrating of how an irrational belief can serve as a seed for something much greater and of high value and how independently of how we got here, we don’t need to anchor to those ideas. I used alchemy as an readily available “irrational” proposition that has to some degree inspired early scientists’s works. We can study the history/Origen and I do think there is value there, but we don’t have to adhere to the practice of alchemy itself. Similarly, we can study how religion has done X and Y and Z without necessarily have to practice it.
If that was not your argument, then there was a misunderstanding and simply just clarify your oringinal argument so I can reply to it because this is what I understood.

At this point you have no excuse for your pointless wrong accusations, you claim that I said something along the lines of "theology is BS/useless" but you clearly failed to show when I said this. And normally I'd give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you misunderstood my point... but guess what, when you first made the silly accusation I corrected you, and then you made it again and I corrected you again and you simply keep making it. And between the two of us, the only one that is the foremost expert in what I think and mean is me. So if you can grab a quote of me that does not even utter the words "theology is bad" in any way shape or form, I can simply just grab any quote of yours that mention no god and claim you mean "god does not exist"... how would that go for an adult sincere conversation if we could do such thing?

How about you stop this regression to childhood and either have the conversation if you genuinely want to have it... or just don't have the conversation at all and ignore it if you don't like where you know it leads and let it whiter in peace?

This whole exercise is a tantrum with your own subconscious, it has been demonstrated to you what is plenty obvious to many that you cannot have an objective difference between the belief in some sort of god and some other supernatural claim. This, angers you to your core because of cognitive dissonance, you want to think that believing in a deity is rational but you know believing in Santa is not and you cannot come up with a reason what methodology you can use to separate those as faith clearly fails you here, and evidence clearly fails you for God.

The moment that you realize this, you will have catharsis and all/most your anger will fade.

I am not interested about how you feel about yourself. I am not trying to disguise your silly theological question(what is the difference between different Gods?)

That has never been my question and I explained to you here:

When I clearly have stated that this is not my question. You might think you are very clever trying to disguise and change my actual question so you can destroy the strawman you have created but I actually read, often multiple times and dwell on my answer and think of the possible replies you might have so that I can address them before they arrive or have the counter prepared. Spotting this kind of strawman are trivial when you actually read and care about a discussion.

So clearly you are now going in circles. Oh well...

RT has provided you with academic education on the subject of atheism, you should address it.

Yes, he did, like 50 pages worth of information, and as soon as I read as many times as I need to absorb that information so I can put a coherent answer I might reply. Unlike you, I do not knee jerk reflex replies. Perhaps if you didn't spend so much time going in circle wasting my time I could have more time to read that Uber long post that I am sure you don't even know what it says yourself.

Indeed, but that is not a belief but within the realm of knowledge as there is evidence. We went through this already, you lost the argument and conceded the point.

Again you are wrong, this has been addressed before at nauseam. Knowledge is a subset of belief. Furthermore, although we colloquially use "know" to mean a very high degree of confidence in practice this is not "knowledge". The very example of my car starting, it cannot be knowledge if it does not start, and I told you before, although I have a high degree of certainty that it will, I cannot account for unknown variables such as a rat chewing the cables of the batteries or a thief stealing my gas or something else. And even colloquially we might use knowledge and "belief with a high degree of confidence" interchangeably, these are not the same. Few things we are justified to call knowledge, and even those that we do, could come to question if we start considering we could live in a matrix, a virtual universe/cosmo or if there is a magical entity feeding each and everyone of us different information.

I am not accusing you of anything, you keep regurgitating the same old trope

Only in response to you going in circles.

and asking "show me the difference between Yahwe, Savaoth, Zeus", your question implies that there is no difference between these Theological Concepts and everything that sources from them.

Another strawman point for you. Read above.

[noemon]

Notice the clear absence of any kind of quote saying that theology is wrong, useless or anything that you have pointed out.

There is a very clear and explicit presence of the adjectives: "inadequate", "insufficient" that you used to describe the field of theology and a very explicit analogy with terms like "primitive" and "ridiculous". It's good that you are denying that any of these adjectives apply to theology but your denial that you actually used these terms in reference to it is really beyond the pale.

I understood it to mean that you thought that religion was the cause that sparked the systematic pursuit and investigation of knowledge (scientific method).

You mean you set up a straw-man instead of being honest about what it actually means and that is that theology is not just subject to the same rigour as other academic fields but that it was theology itself that set up the academic standards themselves and as such it cannot be any of the adjectives you used to describe it.

An argument that has been brought in previous occasions in many different disguises (e.g. enlightenment, etc). And that is what my argument was counterarguing. By showing that you can occasionally end up with good thing even though the spark is misguided.

You have not shown any spark to be misguided.

but you clearly failed to show when I said this.

I have quoted you twice explicitly saying this

This whole exercise is a tantrum with your own subconscious, it has been demonstrated to you what is plenty obvious to many that you cannot have an objective difference between the belief in some sort of god and some other supernatural claim. This, angers you to your core because of cognitive dissonance, you want to think that believing in a deity is rational but you know believing in Santa is not and you cannot come up with a reason what methodology you can use to separate those as faith clearly fails you here, and evidence clearly fails you for God. The moment that you realize this, you will have catharsis and all/most your anger will fade.

I guess you are just talking to yourself and about yourself at this point. Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.

Knowledge is a subset of belief.

Hopefully by now you understand what this statement actually means because you were under the very wrong impression that knowledge being a "subset" of belief meant that knowledge could be separate and independent of belief when in fact belief is a requisite for knowledge.

Furthermore, although we colloquially use "know" to mean a very high degree of confidence in practice this is not "knowledge". The very example of my car starting, it cannot be knowledge if it does not start, and I told you before, although I have a high degree of certainty that it will, I cannot account for unknown variables such as a rat chewing the cables of the batteries or a thief stealing my gas or something else. And even colloquially we might use knowledge and "belief with a high degree of confidence" interchangeably, these are not the same. Few things we are justified to call knowledge, and even those that we do, could come to question if we start considering we could live in a matrix, a virtual universe/cosmo or if there is a magical entity feeding each and everyone of us different information.

Yes, and?

That has never been my question and I explained to you here:

Every time you have your question answered you claim that you never made it. Your "explanation" in case you have missed it, does not mention anything about your question but it simply talks about how awesome you consider yourself to be. It is a purely vain paragraph that talks only about yourself and not about the question in any way or form.

Xoggyux wrote:
When I clearly have stated that this is not my question. You might think you are very clever trying to disguise and change my actual question so you can destroy the strawman you have created but I actually read, often multiple times and dwell on my answer and think of the possible replies you might have so that I can address them before they arrive or have the counter prepared. Spotting this kind of strawman are trivial when you actually read and care about a discussion.

Is this for real?

Another strawman point for you. Read above.

You wrote your question and claimed that I am dodging it:

If it so easy, then point it out. How do you determine that believing in magical entity X is more reasonable than magical entity Y or supertition A more reasonable than supertition B. In other words, how do you determine that believing in Santa is fundamentally different than believing on Yahweh or Islam fundamentally different from astrology. It seems your argument is “voila, it is self evident”. Well the answer is, it is not self evident, and if it were, every person would believe on the same religion... because it is self evident. Please don’t dodge, if you don’t have an answer just say it.

I reply to it:

Your question implies that there is no difference between these Theological Concepts("magical beings" in under 11's lingo) and everything that sources from them. To this silly argument I am telling you that there are major differences between them, differences studied in theology, ontology, comparative religious studies & anthropological religious studies. If your argument is that there is no substantive difference between these theological concepts, then prove it, which is a very reasonable request. The difference between Santa and the most perfect being you can conceive of is quite substantial obviously. If Santa is the most perfect being you can conceive then good for you, use that to enhance your self and core of your being.

[XogGyux]

There is a very clear and explicit presence of the adjectives: "inadequate", "insufficient", "primitive" and "ridiculous" that you used to describe the field of theology. It's good that you are denying it that any of these adjectives apply to theology but your denial that you actually used these terms in reference to it is really beyond the pale.

LOL, you can believe whatever you want. Up to you. I am done with this nonsense that you are doing. You failed to provide a quote saying what you claim I said and now doing the usual contortions to try to make an argument in bad faith. Not unexpected but the amusement is now over.’

You mean you set up a straw-man instead of being honest about what it actually means and that is that theology is not just subject to the same rigour as other academic fields but that it was theology itself that set up the academic standards themselves and as such it cannot be any of the adjectives you used to describe it.

It is not a strawman. At best you could have made the case that there was some misunderstanding, some communication problem. Something that I would have accepted if you had actually spent any time clarifying rather than asserting wild, incorrect assertions. Even when you make obvious strawman that’s what I do, I clarify and explicitlely state what I have said.

You have not shown any spark to be misguided.

Depend of which spark you are talking. I gave a few examples. And true, I have not shown that alchemy or astrology are misguided, but I don’t see the reason to do so as it is my assumption that you don’t subscribe of either one of them. If you which me to make a case for them being misguided, I could. The other spark I have mentioned is religion, and I have been making a case for it being misguided not only in this thread but almost a decade in this forum. Any system that subscribes itself to the dogmatic belief in some sort of supernatural entity or set of beliefs and then lays down a set of arbitrary moral conduct which objectively it is not moral and then either defends or endorses despicable acts such as rape, slavery, etc, etc is misguided, cruel and unethical at the very least.

I have quoted you twice explicitly saying this :?:

It must be that god of trickery that is affecting the internet cables and changing the quote or something, because when I read the very quote you provided it does not have me saying anything regarding academic theology. Damn Loki, god of trickery.

I guess you are just talking to yourself and about yourself at this point. Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person.

LOL the most perfect being is that who somehow created an universe that makes perfect sense without his existence yet he/she/them? wants some sort of adoration and belief in its existence? And I could just sit here and write close to 1000 posts on the atrocities stipulated, supposedly sanctioned by your god and taught by the various churches. And I’d argue that in the pursuit if ethics and morality, the goal is not to compare yourself to others, to see if you are “winning” of sort, or how far “behind” you are. This is a lifelong process and it always requires continuous reflection and betterment and the comparisons are trivial, misguided at best. Specially when you don’t even have access to this “perfect being” that you talk about. Clearly you cannot rely on scripture, even if I were to grant you for the sake of argument that it has some sort of Origen in divine, the fact is that it has been corrupted over the millennia by men translating and copying and altering, furthermore the cherry picking for those that are “good and wise” passage and those that were “some sort of metaphor or poetry” is heavily influenced by current, secular moral values.

Hopefully by now you understand what this statement actually means because you were under the very wrong impression that knowledge being a "subset" of belief meant that knowledge could be separate and independent of belief when in fact belief is a requisite for knowledge.

I have been pretty clear on my usage of knowledge and belief. Claims of knowledge imply a belief, though the oposite is not necessarily true (claims of belief do not require knowledge). It is like saying all cars are vehicles, but not all vehicles are car. So belief can in fact be separated/independent from knowledge and you can make the claim for a belief without actually claiming to have the knowledge (when it comes to religion these are the terms of atheism and agnosticism).
I am confident I have said the same sort of statement over the weeks in this thread.

Yes, and?

Just like I said. The fact that we use in everyday language “knowledge” to mean “I have a high degree of confidence” is not the same as when it is used epistemologically. And the belief that my car will start is just that, a belief. Granted, a belief that has far more weight and evidence than any god has ever had, but a belief nonetheless. Wether we call it “knowledge” colloquially is of no consequence as the fact is, epistemically speaking, this is not technically knowledge as we lack information. Your dismissal is thus unwarranted.

Every time you have your question answered you claim that you never made it. :?: Your "explanation" in case you have missed it, does not mention anything about your question but it simply talks about how awesome you consider yourself to be. It is a purely vain paragraph that talks only about yourself and not about the question in any way or form.

You have not, in fact answered my question. In fact you keep switching the question and attempting to answering a question I never asked. I have told you before. At this point I am not concerned with specific, dogmatic beliefs of the different religions, because if the core belief of religion is unwarranted, it follows that the dogmas themselves are unwarranted. So if you cannot even justify the core belief, I don’t care that you explain that Christians believe Jesus resurrected, Muslims believe that women have to cover their heads and Jews believe they have to chop a piece of penis. If you cannot justify the belief in a supernatural, magical being I could care less what it is presumed to be the wishes and demands of said beings. Not only you cannot provide justification for such being (or beings) but you also fail to show how you could go about to determine and differentiate among multiple different supernatural claims, including any of the gold and new gods but also any other kind of magical being or supernatural belief system, such as astrology for instance.

Your question implies that there is no difference between these Theological Concepts("magical being" in under 11's lingo) and everything that sources from them. To this silly argument I am telling you that there are major differences between them, differences studied in theology, ontology, comparative religious studies & anthropological religious studies. If your argument is that there is no substantive difference between these concepts, then prove it, which is a very reasonable request.

How is this a strawman? :?:

What boiled your blood was not that I compared Yahweh or Jesus to Allah or Xenu or some other god, but that I compared it to some other magical being such as an unicorn or a pixie or a religious belief vs other superstitious belief system such as astrology. Yet despite your unwarranted indignation you cannot provide for a reasonable method to distinguish between these propositions. Theology, comparative religion, anthropological religious studies, etc do not study non-religious magical claims and thus surely the answer is not within their realm of study. Clearly you have not provided the answer to my question, you simply made up a completely different question and answered that. That is by definition a strawman.
I have told you before, you are free to believe anything but don’t get furious and angry and throw a temper tantrum when your unwarranted belief is compared to some other unwarranted belief that to you appears childish. And off course the comparison has to be a shocking one, an unicorn, a santaclaus or something like that. Because unfortunately our society have become numb to such claims and you would readily accept accept the proposition of a religion that was clearly invented by some con man (e.g. Scientology/Mormonism) just because there are some other adults that you respect that unjustifiable believe in the same crap. The case for more ancient religions is just slightly harder to make, but of course these were also invented as well by men, Christians addapted Jews religion with pagan/Roman myths sprinkled in, and in kind, Jews also took multiple earlier Sumerian myths to make up their religion.

If you feel insulted by the comparison, take it with your god, he/she/them is/are the one that is playing hide a seek.

[noemon]

It is not a strawman. At best you could have made the case that there was some misunderstanding, some communication problem.

Sure..

Any system that subscribes itself to the dogmatic belief in some sort of supernatural entity or set of beliefs and then lays down a set of arbitrary moral conduct which objectively it is not moral and then either defends or endorses despicable acts such as rape, slavery, etc, etc is misguided, cruel and unethical at the very least.

Your behaviour in here is evidently dogmatic and misguided as it has been shown several times and further demonstrated below:

It must be that god of trickery that is affecting the internet cables and changing the quote or something, because when I read the very quote you provided it does not have me saying anything regarding academic theology. Damn Loki, god of trickery.

The only thing that upsets me in here is not your nonsense about Gods and unicorns as you believe, but your denial that you said what you said. It is extremely rude, I get it all the time from my young children and I come here to have an adult discussion and I get it from supposed adults in here as well. You have spent several posts trying to deny your own words which you used in reference to the system of theology and theologians. When I quote someone and I reply to them, I do not repeat the words in the quote but we all take it to mean that the subject of the quote is what we are actually talking about. Clearly not the case for you as you quote someone, and then pretend that you were not talking about the very thing you actually quoted.

LOL the most perfect being is that who somehow created an universe that makes perfect sense without his existence yet he/she/them? wants some sort of adoration and belief in its existence? And I could just sit here and write close to 1000 posts on the atrocities stipulated, supposedly sanctioned by your god and taught by the various churches. [This is dogma, claims, teachings of a particular one or more religious groups] And I’d argue that in the pursuit if ethics and morality, the goal is not to compare yourself to others, to see if you are “winning” of sort, or how far “behind” you are. This is a lifelong process and it always requires continuous reflection and betterment and the comparisons are trivial, misguided at best. Specially when you don’t even have access to this “perfect being” that you talk about. Clearly you cannot rely on scripture, even if I were to grant you for the sake of argument that it has some sort of Origen in divine, the fact is that it has been corrupted over the millennia by men translating and copying and altering, furthermore the cherry picking for those that are “good and wise” passage and those that were “some sort of metaphor or poetry” is heavily influenced by current, secular moral values.

Italic Brackets are my own. See below.

You know this is more than hilarious, you cannot even be honest with your own self. You spend several posts accusing me of "strawmen" when I mention theology, ontology and comparative religious studies as a reply to your question, you keep repeating the phrase:

I do not concern myself with the specific dogma, teachings, claims or culture within a particular religion as truly there are as many religions as there are religious people, as every single person believes a slightly different story.
I am only concerned by the mechanism by which said belief is accepted/held by the believer.

The ridiculous thing which shows how much out of touch you are with your own arguments is that you repeat the mantra in this same post:

You have not, in fact answered my question. In fact you keep switching the question and attempting to answering a question I never asked. I have told you before. At this point I am not concerned with specific, dogmatic beliefs of the different religions, because if the core belief of religion is unwarranted, it follows that the dogmas themselves are unwarranted. So if you cannot even justify the core belief, I don’t care that you explain that Christians believe Jesus resurrected, Muslims believe that women have to cover their heads and Jews believe they have to chop a piece of penis. If you cannot justify the belief in a supernatural, magical being I could care less what it is presumed to be the wishes and demands of said beings. Not only you cannot provide justification for such being (or beings) but you also fail to show how you could go about to determine and differentiate among multiple different supernatural claims, including any of the gold and new gods but also any other kind of magical being or supernatural belief system, such as astrology for instance.

Switching the question is exactly what you have just been caught doing.

I am giving you my own personal mechanism and what do you do when I do? You start talking about dogmas, claims, histories of various religious groups instead. The very thing that you are supposedly not interested in doing and all that as an actual strawman response to my personal faith which did not mention any scripture and which you have quoted. Here it is again:

Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.

Indeed we should not compare ourselves to other humans, we should measure ourselves and our conduct to the greatest being that we can conceive of so that we become the very best that we can be.

Your argument is not just a strawman, it is an extremely hypocritical one too considering all your nonsense. My answer to your question that the difference between different Gods can be found in theology and between any different concept in ontology is neither a strawman to your question, nor false, but the plain truth of the matter. My justification for my belief to what I consider to be the most perfect being is that this mental/spiritual exercise helps me become a better person, a Muslim does that same exercise by measuring himself, actions and behaviour in relation to Allah and his attributes in the Quran, a Christian with Savaoth, a Jew with Yahwe, some children with Santa, some atheist people/children with Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga. To each his own. The difference between Savaoth, Santa, Unicorns, Bieber, and Gaga are ontological differences and the outcomes from using different beings as models are huge and varied across a lot of fields. The name I use for the most perfect being I can conceive of is literally The Being which in Greek it literally is The On(Διoν) or Theos(Θεος).

I have been pretty clear on my usage of knowledge and belief. Claims of knowledge imply a belief, though the opposite is not necessarily true (claims of belief do not require knowledge). It is like saying all cars are vehicles, but not all vehicles are car.

It took me some pages, but you finally understood the obvious, it still has not prevented you however from attempting to repeat your trashed nonsense about atheism and agnosticism on which you insisted with militant rudeness that agnosticism can make a claim of knowledge without making a claim on belief.

So belief can in fact be separated/independent from knowledge and you can make the claim for a belief without actually claiming to have the knowledge (when it comes to religion these are the terms of atheism and agnosticism).

In reply to this:

Agnosticism is about lack of knowledge and lack of belief.

You said:

You are incorrect. Agnosticism is only concerned by knowledge as your own quote states. Knowledge is a subset of belief and thus your statement is incorrect.

And also:

One deals with knowledge, the other deals with belief.

And also:

a) Agnosticism does not make a claim on belief, agnosticism is the claim of not knowing that a god does not exist.

Just like I said. The fact that we use in everyday language “knowledge” to mean “I have a high degree of confidence” is not the same as when it is used epistemologically. And the belief that my car will start is just that, a belief. Granted, a belief that has far more weight and evidence than any god has ever had, but a belief nonetheless. Wether we call it “knowledge” colloquially is of no consequence as the fact is, epistemically speaking, this is not technically knowledge as we lack information. Your dismissal is thus unwarranted.

If you are justified in believing that the car will start and have sufficient information for such a justification, then it is not a belief, but knowledge. If you want to argue that unless we have 100% of information we cannot be thus justified to hold this belief and as such we cannot use the term knowledge for anything, that is fine with me as long as you apply this consistently to your general arguments regarding religion and simply admit that since you lack this information you cannot claim to have any justified opinion on the matter at all.

You should realise by now that when you are wrong about something, you will be wrong on it across any and all iterations. Now, choose between one of the 2 options before you proceed.

What boiled your blood was not that I compared Yahweh or Jesus to Allah or Xenu or some other god, but that I compared it to some other magical being such as an unicorn or a pixie or a religious belief vs other superstitious belief system such as astrology. Yet despite your unwarranted indignation you cannot provide for a reasonable method to distinguish between these propositions. Theology, comparative religion, anthropological religious studies, etc do not study non-religious magical claims and thus surely the answer is not within their realm of study. Clearly you have not provided the answer to my question, you simply made up a completely different question and answered that. That is by definition a strawman.

As I said previously in this post, the only thing that upsets me is your obtuse denial of denying your own words. I am not bothered by these weak arguments or strawmen, they are some of the weakest arguments I have encountered in this forum on this subject.

The difference between Santa and my personal God(the most perfect being that I can conceive of) is very obvious. Santa is not the most perfect being that exists. There fore I will not measure myself, actions and moral behaviour in relation to santa, or in relation to a unicorn or in relation to a vampire. Theology is not required to tell you this much, so your straw within a straw is quite ridiculous. If you want to go deep into this subject you can use the field of ontology which is the study of examining any kind of concept right down to its very core.

[XogGyux]

The only thing that upsets me in here is not your nonsense about Gods and unicorns as you believe, but your denial that you said what you said. It is extremely rude, I get it all the time from my young children and I come here to have an adult discussion and I get it from supposed adults in here as well. You have spent several posts trying to deny your own words which you used in reference to the system of theology and theologians. When I quote someone and I reply to them, I do not repeat the words in the quote but we all take it to mean that the subject of the quote is what we are actually talking about. Clearly not the case for you as you quote someone, and then pretend that you were not talking about the very thing you actually quoted.

Let's analyze the evidence shall we? In the many pages of this discussion you have posted the definition of certain words that you looked up yourself in a dictionary while arguing that they mean something else than they do after I explained to you, in detail, that you were incorrect. So you posted these definitions and what did we find? your very own definition made the point for me... when you kept making the same mistake I even bolded and highlighted it for you and you kept making the same mistake again and I quoted again the same quote (that you originally provided) at which point you got mad/embarrassed and started complaining that I made the font of 2-3 words too big and didn't look good. Fine, the discussion went on, presumably you accepted that you were mistaken... More recently you claim that I said something along the lines of "theology is crap" and when I asked to show me a quote of me saying that, you reply with a quote of a sentence of mine that does not even mention theology at all . And despite my explicit clarification you have kept complaining and crying for 2 days now, about the same silly thing.... as if it even matters, after all, I am free to change my mind even if at some point were to say that (which I didn't). You are fighting a strawman, and you are hurting yourself in the process.
Consider the matter about theology is done. I will not discuss it further, I am not going to continue enabling such childish tantrums I have enough decency to not have to watch someone go through this sort of regression.

Switching the question is exactly what you have just been caught doing.

I am giving you my own personal mechanism and what do you do when I do? You start talking about dogmas, claims, histories of various religious groups instead. The very thing that you are supposedly not interested in doing and all that as an actual strawman response to my personal faith which did not mention any scripture and which you have quoted. Here it is again:

There is a misunderstanding here. When we are talking about what people are justified to believe, I don't care for dogmas or claims, etc. And I gave you the reason why... if the core belief (yahweh exists, allah exists, zeus exist, etc) is not true, the rest cannot stand on its own.
I can certainly discuss dogmas, claims and religious beliefs within the paradigm of making moral assessments and proclamations, precisely because people use these to guide their lives and make decisions. And when it comes to moral/ethical proclamations, the different dogmas, beliefs, etc do carry a weight independently of whether a god/deity exists or not. In fact, I am sure we can at least agree that it is not possible that all worshiped gods actually exist so at least a large subset of those dogmas and practiced beliefs are obviously misguided but yet they are pervasively practiced every day.

Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.

This is plain nonsense. What you are saying here, for it to make any sense, you would need a God whose qualities for perfection can objectively be verified. You cannot even produce said god much less independently confirm its "perfect" characteristics. Why is it important for this to be objective? Because if it isn't, if it comes merely from your imagination, you will always imagine a being that is consistent with what YOU consider a model of perfection. Basically, you would be measuring your own moral character against your own moral character which is an exercise in futility. This is why the Ideal "perfect" god that the terrorist muslim idealizes allows for the muslim terrorist to do terrorists acts and why the ideal "perfect" Christian god of a fundamentalist KKK member agrees with the views of crazy this KKK guy while at the same time there are both non terrorists and non KKK Muslims and Christians that are loving and compassionate that also imagine a god that you guessed it, agree with them.
There is a method to improve one's moral character, and that is to learn about ethics, morality, human behaviour, science, etc... Imagining gods and measuring yourself about said imaginary measuring stick is just an exercise in futility.

My justification for my belief to what I consider to be the most perfect being is that this mental/spiritual exercise helps me become a better person, a Muslim does that same exercise by measuring himself, actions and behaviour in relation to Allah and his attributes in the Quran, a Christian with Savaoth, a Jew with Yahwe, some children with Santa, some atheist people/children with Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga.

That is not a justification. Basically, you are saying I really really want it to be some kind of god so that I can measure myself up to it/him/her in comparison. I already explained above why this idea of "measuring" against a god is problematic, but more importantly, you would first have to arrive to the realization that said entity exists before you can start measuring... how do you arrive to this conclusion?
As a side note, I did not realize atheists were such big fans of MJ, Justin Biever or Lady gaga. I myself don't like any of those and prefer classical music, romantic period as if my portrait of Beethoven was not subtle enough.

It took me some pages, but you finally understood the obvious, it still has not prevented you however from attempting to repeat your trashed nonsense about atheism and agnosticism on which you insisted with militant rudeness that agnosticism can make a claim of knowledge without making a claim on belief.

So belief can in fact be separated/independent from knowledge and you can make the claim for a belief without actually claiming to have the knowledge (when it comes to religion these are the terms of atheism and agnosticism).

I thought we were past this, but apparently not. Can theists read like normal people? dont you relize that what you are claiming I said is that (and it is bolded) "agnosticism can make a claim of knowledge without making a claim of belief" and this is incorrect. When you make a claim of knowledge you are also making a claim of belief, because knowledge is a subset of belief, something that I have been saying for months now.
Now, let's go to the second quote: "Belief can, in fact, be separated/independent from knowledge and you can make the claim for a belief without actually claiming to have the knowledge" And this is correct. I can have the belief that extraterrestrial beings exist without claiming to have such knowledge.
Like I told you before, all cars are vehicles but not all vehicles are cars. So you can say: "I can take a vehicle to travel from newyork to england" and make sense, because some vehicles (planes/boats) can indeed transport you to england from newyork, while you cannot say "I can take a car to travel from newyork to england" because cars on their own cannot do that.
At this point, I don't know if you are being obtuse on purpose or if you genuinely lack the capacity to understand these very basic concepts. I am properly flabbergasted.
I will simply not waste further of my time trying to explain basic language mechanic to you. The explanations have been quite clear and numerous over the pages of this thread, if it suits you, you can go back and read carefully and learn something if not, you can continue making simple mistakes. Up to you.

If you are justified in believing that the car will start and have sufficient information for such a justification, then it is not a belief, but knowledge.

That is incorrect. There are different definitions of knowledge, but the easiest one to understand in this particular example is knowledge as justified true belief. So if you have a justified belief do you have knowledge? NO! it also have to be true to be called knowledge. I'll give you an example:
Come home, your TV is missing. You might have a justified belief that a thief came and stole it. Is this knowledge? It might be justified because your door was not locked when you arrived, the tv was missing, you know thieves exists and you have been reading in the local news of your neighborhood about a band of thieves stealing stuff. Now, you review the camera video and you see that your son was playing in the living room with a ball and broke the TV so he took it and hide it so you would not find it... Your original belief was justified because you had some evidence that pointed in that direction. But now you have even better evidence, the kind that we can call "knowledge" (unless you subscribe to branches of philosophical existentialism that propose some sort of virtual existence or altered sensorium) at this point your previous belief should be discarded and you formulate a new belief, this time it is also justified (video camera evidence) and it is true (thus qualifies as knowledge). Again, in everyday life, the usage of belief and knowledge is trivial and as a rule of thumbs, you can interchange these terms and people will still understand you. But when it comes to philosophical discussions or discussion about hypothetical unfalsifiable and not-proven entities such as god, the meaning of these terms become more important.

Likewise, in my previous example for the car. Like I told you. Although colloquially it would be reasonable to claim "knowledge", for something with a high confidence, in practice, epistemically speaking it is not knowledge.

If you want to argue that unless we have 100% of information we cannot be thus justified to hold this belief and as such we cannot use the term knowledge for anything, that is fine with me as long as you apply this consistently to your general arguments regarding religion and simply admit that since you lack this information you cannot claim to have any justified opinion on the matter at all.

No, I do not want to argue that. That is, in fact, my criticism towards RhethoricThug and his regression towards absolute skepticism as a method to cast doubt into "reality". As long as we are clear that there is a difference between justified belief (which requires a degree of confidence, usually from some sort of evidence) and unjustified belief (as when using faith) we are on the same page.

The difference between Santa and my personal God(the most perfect being that I can conceive of) is very obvious. Santa is not the most perfect being that exists. There fore I will not measure myself, actions and moral behaviour in relation to santa, or in relation to a unicorn or in relation to a vampire. Theology is not required to tell you this much, so your straw within a straw is quite ridiculous. If you want to go deep into this subject you can use the field of ontology which is the study of examining any kind of concept right down to its very core.

Yeah, this is still not a method by which you can examine and differenciate belief in different supernatural claims (magic invisible pink unicorn, god, astrology, etc). The first step to measure something is to use an instrument that actually exists (ruler, beaker, odometer, calendar, etc). If the said being does not exist, you cannot measure yourself up as I explained earlier. And if you simply imagine it, you are just measuring against yourself, which is futile.

[noemon]

Let's analyze the evidence shall we? In the many pages of this discussion you have posted the definition of certain words that you looked up yourself in a dictionary while arguing that they mean something else than they do after I explained to you, in detail, that you were incorrect. So you posted these definitions and what did we find? your very own definition made the point for me... when you kept making the same mistake I even bolded and highlighted it for you and you kept making the same mistake again and I quoted again the same quote (that you originally provided) at which point you got mad/embarrassed and started complaining that I made the font of 2-3 words too big and didn't look good. Fine, the discussion went on, presumably you accepted that you were mistaken...

This not an analysis of any evidence, just you talking nonsense without any evidence.

More recently you claim that I said something along the lines of "theology is crap" and when I asked to show me a quote of me saying that, you quote a sentence of mine that does not even mention theology.

The sentences of yours are quoting theology and theologians. Your obtuse denial prevents any kind of rational conversation from taking place as you will evidently say anything once you are proven wrong, just like you do further on this post as well. Once your argument is shown wrong, you pretend you never made it.

You misunderstand. When we talking about what people are justified to believe, I don't care for dogmas or claims, etc. And I gave you the reason why... if the core belief (yahweh exists, allah exists, zeus exist, etc) is not true, the rest cannot stand on its own.
I can certainly discuss dogmas, claims and religious beliefs within the paradigm of making moral assessments and proclamations, precisely because people use these to guide their lives and make decisions. And when it comes to moral/ethical proclamations, the different dogmas, beliefs, etc do carry a weight independently of whether a god/deity exists or not. In fact, I am sure we can at least agree that it is not possible that all worshiped gods actually exists so at least a large subset of those dogmas and practiced beliefs are obviously misguided but yet they are pervasively practiced every day.

I gave you my justification for my belief, you quoted it once again(like you did with theology) and you started ranting about dogma, beliefs and histories of other religions, the very thing you supposedly do not care about discussing and the very thing that you accused me as a strawman. Are you going to start crying again that what you quoted to respond is not what you were responding to, like you have been doing with theology?

Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.

What you are saying here, for it to make any sense, you would need a God whose qualities for perfection can objectively be verified. You cannot even produce said god much less independently confirm its "perfect" characteristics. Why is it important for this to be objective? Because if it isn't, if it comes merely from your imagination, you will always imagine a being that is consistent with what YOU consider a model of perfection. Basically, you would be measuring your own moral character against your own moral character which is an exercise in futility. This is why the Ideal "perfect" god that the terrorist muslim idealizes allows for the muslim terrorist to do terrorists acts and why the ideal "perfect" Christian god of a fundamentalist KKK member agrees with the views of crazy this KKK guy while at the same time there are both non terrorists and non KKK Muslims and Christians that are loving and compassionate that also imagine a god that you guessed it, agree with them.
There is a method to improve one's moral character, and that is to learn about ethics, morality, human behaviour, science, etc... Imagining gods and measuring yourself about said imaginary measuring stick is just an exercise in futility.

You should educate yourself more on philosophy and more specifically on Plato's Ethical Philosophy based on the Form of the Good as well as the Theory of Forms. Hypothesising perfection and utilising abstract & perfect forms that do not actually physically exist, like circles and straight lines in order to measure imperfect things is not an exercise in futility but the most important exercise of all.

As a side note, I did not realize atheists were such big fans of MJ, Justin Biever or Lady gaga.

Would you prefer people idolised Justin Bieber or Jesus Christ? The fact that people idolise people is quite obvious regardless if you argue that they should not, must not, or whatever. I am pretty sure you will try to say neither, more likely you will cry, scream, shout, pretend you do not get the question, but do make an effort to choose 1 one of the 2, and preferably explain your choice as well.

I thought we were past this, but apparently not. Can theists read like normal people? dont you relize that what you are claiming I said is that (and it is bolded) "agnosticism can make a claim of knowledge without making a claim of belief" and this is incorrect.

I know it is incorrect because it took me several pages proving to you that it is incorrect and you were denying it for several pages. I don't even know what you are trying to pretend here, that you are me?

I don't know if you are being obtuse on purpose...I am properly flabbergasted.... I will simply not waste further of my time trying to explain basic language mechanic to you.

What am I being obtuse about? You have quoted your own self and replied to your own self. I don't even know what the heck you are talking about and what does the vehicle/car example -which is correct- is supposed to address.

That is incorrect. There are different definitions of knowledge, but the easiest one to understand in this particular example is knowledge as justified true belief. So if you have a justified belief do you have knowledge? NO! it also have to be true to be called knowledge. I'll give you an example:
Come home, your TV is missing. You might have a justified belief that a thief came and stole it. Is this knowledge? It might be justified because your door was not locked when you arrived, the tv was missing, you know thieves exists and you have been reading in the local news of your neighborhood about a band of thieves stealing stuff. Now, you review the camera video and you see that your son was playing in the living room with a ball and broke the TV so he took it and hide it so you would not find it... Your original belief was justified because you had some evidence that pointed in that direction. But now you have even better evidence, the kind that we can call "knowledge" (unless you subscribe to branches of philosophical existentialism that propose some sort of virtual existence or altered sensorium) at this point your previous belief should be discarded and you formulate a new belief, this time it is also justified (video camera evidence) and it is true (thus qualifies as knowledge). Again, in everyday life, the usage of belief and knowledge is trivial and as a rule of thumbs, you can interchange these terms and people will still understand you. But when it comes to philosophical discussions or discussion about hypothetical unfalsifiable and not-proven entities such as god, the meaning of these terms become more important.

No, it simply means the original belief was not justified.

No, I do not want to argue that.

Of course you don't and as such you shouldn't. Glad we agree your previous argument was wrong and as such mine was right:

This one:

Wether we call it “knowledge” colloquially is of no consequence as the fact is, epistemically speaking, this is not technically knowledge as we lack information. Your dismissal is thus unwarranted.

As long as we are clear that there is a difference between justified belief (which requires a degree of confidence, usually from some sort of evidence) and unjustified belief (as when using faith) we are on the same page.

Of course we are not on the same page that faith's belief is unjustified. I can see you are about to tangle yourself up like before. I really hope you don't.

Yeah, this is still not a method by which you can examine and differenciate belief in different supernatural claims (magic invisible pink unicorn, god, astrology, etc). The first step to measure something is to use an instrument that actually exists (ruler, beaker, odometer, calendar, etc). If the said being does not exist, you cannot measure yourself up as I explained earlier. And if you simply imagine it, you are just measuring against yourself, which is futile.

You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have. You mention a ruler which measures an imaginary straight line. See Plato above before you make any more and deny the utility of abstract forms, because you will regret it and then you will be pretending you never said any of this once again.

[XogGyux]

This not an analysis of any evidence, just you talking nonsense without any evidence.



The sentences of yours are quoting theology and theologians. Your obtuse denial prevents any kind of rational conversation from taking place as you will evidently say anything once you are proven wrong, just like you do further on this post as well. Once your argument is shown wrong, you pretend you never made it.



I gave you my justification for my belief, you quoted it once again(like you did with theology) and you started ranting about dogma, beliefs and histories of other religions, the very thing you supposedly do not care about discussing and the very thing that you accused me as a strawman. Are you going to start crying again that what you quoted to respond is not what you were responding to, like you have been doing with theology?

Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.



You should educate yourself more on philosophy and more specifically on Plato's Ethical Philosophy based on the Form of the Good as well as the Theory of Forms. Hypothesising perfection and utilising abstract & perfect forms that do not actually physically exist, like circles and straight lines in order to measure imperfect things is not an exercise in futility but the most important exercise of all.



Would you prefer people idolised Justin Bieber or Jesus Christ? The fact that people idolise people is quite obvious regardless if you argue that they should not, must not, or whatever. I am pretty sure you will try to say neither, more likely you will cry, scream, shout, pretend you do not get the question, but do make an effort to choose 1 one of the 2, and preferably explain your choice as well.



I know it is incorrect because it took me several pages proving to you that it is incorrect and you were denying it for several pages. I don't even know what you are trying to pretend here, that you are me?



What am I being obtuse about? You have quoted your own self and replied to your own self. I don't even know what the heck you are talking about and what does the vehicle/car example -which is correct- is supposed to address. :?:



No, it simply means the original belief was not justified.



Of course you don't and as such you shouldn't. Glad we agree your previous argument was wrong and as such mine was right:

This one:





Of course we are not on the same page that faith's belief is unjustified. I can see you are about to tangle yourself up like before. I really hope you don't.



You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have. You mention a ruler which measures an imaginary straight line. See Plato above before you make any more and deny the utility of abstract forms, because you will regret it and then you will be pretending you never said any of this once again.

I am finishing chasing your tail. Will not further discuss the points that have been discussed at nauseaum, as it turns out debating the proberbial rock is far less interesting than I thought.
Some quick points about new info:

Would you prefer people idolised Justin Bieber or Jesus Christ?

Neither. Idolising is stupid. Idolising a parent is stupid, idolising a dictator is stupid, idolising money is stupid, idolising an actor, actress, singer, fashion designer, church figure, the church itself, magical figure, angel, demons, gods, planet, universe, science etc is stupid. Idolising is to love and venerate unquestionably and uncritically something/someone and I don't think why in the hell you would think that I would support such action after I have made a case over so many pages (and years previously) for objectivity and reason.

I am pretty sure you will try to say neither, more likely you will cry, scream, shout, pretend you do not get the question, but do make an effort to choose 1 one of the 2, and preferably explain your choice as well.

Guess what, I don't have to make a choice about two stupid answers. Not to mention, that for starters, you would have to show not only that Jesus did in fact existed but most importantly that we have an accurate representation of what he said, did, etc. As it turns out the earlier records that talk about anything related to Jesus life are believed to have been written about 30 something years AFTER his presumed death and none of the writers are believed to be actual witnesses.

No, it simply means the original belief was not justified.

That is incorrect. Go back to the whole exercise. Why do you think that epistemologist made the addition of "true" to "justified belief" when defined knowledge? We can have a justified belief that turns out it is false (as in the previous exercise). In fact, as I told you before, true knowledge is quite rare, so what we colloquially call "knowledge" is by in large a bunch of "justified beliefs." A small portion of those justified beliefs (e.g. in the case of my car not started) will in fact not be "knowledge" precisely because we lack all the variables. I am justified to believe because I have a body of evidence. For instance, imagine a post-apocalyptic word kind of like zombie/planet of the apes movies etc, if I were to find a random abandoned car, I would not be justified to believe that it would start because I know NOTHING about that car (does it have gasoline? does it have a battery? did someone abandon the car because it was not working? etc). If you were to ask me, the rational response would be "I don't know" rather than "I have faith it will start", faith would not be a rational, justified belief.
So there are the following basic cathegories:
No belief/Withhold belief (the rational thing to do when evidence is not available)
Unjustified belief -> Faith
Justified belief -> Have a degree of evidence that is proportional to the belief, what is considered proportional might vary from person to person and it does have a degree of subjectivity. It might turn out that you have evidence that points towards an incorrect belief, that does not matter, you are justified if you have sufficient evidence. If even more evidence becomes available, you can simply change/adapt the belief as necessary
Knowledge -> This is exceedingly rare and there is a caveat from philosophical perspective that deals with existentialism. I don't care for that because regardless of whether we live in the matrix or we are being fed virtual information directly into our minds by magical pixies I am stuck in this "reality" and my well being and mental sanity depend on me accepting it. So aside for maximal philosophical skepticism, in practice, this would come from knowing most/all of the variables of a situation.

You mention a ruler which measures an imaginary straight line. See Plato above before you make any more and deny the utility of abstract forms, because you will regret it and then you will be pretending you never said any of this once again.

The key difference here is that you have an idea of what a perfect circle, a perfect square or a perfect line might look like even though in the real world these are constrained by physical limitations and you couldn't possibly get any of them. When it comes to perfect morality, you cannot model what a perfectly moral being would look like. I can conceptually call for a perfect line by stating a line is a straight one-dimensional figure having no thickness and extending infinitely in both directions. While in contrast, you cannot do the same for some morally perfect being. This is why every single god, turns out to have a moral character that "approves" of the character of those who believe in said god as I explained to you before.

Me trying to measure myself, actions and behaviour against the most perfect being I can conceive is my own personal exercise to be a better person. I require no physical evidence of such a being to conduct such a mental/spiritual/psychological exercise and I do not require to excuse myself to any person that [unjustifiably] believes he/she has the right to mock me for it.

Explained to you why this is an exercise in futility in a previous post. Will not repeat me for the sake brevity, refer back if you want.

I know it is incorrect because it took me several pages proving to you that it is incorrect and you were denying it for several pages. I don't even know what you are trying to pretend here, that you are me?

You know nothing of the sort as evidenced by making the same mistake over and over for months now but I have lost interest in helping you get there because you don't show any interest in actually being engaged in the conversation. I trust the answer is quite obvious to anyone critically reading/analyzing the discussion so I will not continue chasing your tail at this point.

Of course you don't and as such you shouldn't. Glad we agree your previous argument was wrong and as such mine was right:

This exposes the children mentality by which you are approaching this discussion. Rather than to approach in a sincere manner to evaluate what we mean and think you have spent a month in which I am saying "I mean this" and you say "no you are wrong, what you mean is that" as if for some stupid reason, anybody reading this would be gullible enough to believe that you have a better understanding of what I mean. One thing is to have a language constraint in which misunderstandings can happen, but if that is the case simple clarification can take of the problem but this is not how you operate. You don't clarify your points and you don't accept my clarifications.... Again, I lost interest for said reason, I rather discuss something with a sincere idiot that with someone that is deceiving.

Of course we are not on the same page that faith's belief is unjustified.

"I have faith in a magical invisible pink unicorn."
Am I being justified in this belief?

You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have.

Astrology is not a calendar. Astrology is: is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.
Calendar is: A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system.

So obviously they are not the same thing. This is the moment that you demonstrate for me what has been happening through many pages/weeks already. Thank you.

What am I being obtuse about?

Nothing at all.

Finally, of the two of us, only one has an open mind approach to this situation. I have a position that can be easily changed by evidence. Tomorrow I could wake up and god could be serving me breakfast in my bed and after a short period of startle and fear, a long conversation and a few amusing magic tricks (some of them which might involve you growing a nice fluffy tail, ears, and whiskers, so if it happens tomorrow don't freak out, take a picture I'll ask him to revert you back to normal after, we will laugh together sometime in the future) I will believe in him. However, if tomorrow we don't find evidence are you going to change your mind? I quite doubt it.

[noemon]

Neither.

Guess what, I don't have to make a choice about two stupid answers.

Very predictable but whether you make a choice or not it does not stop people doing exactly that with both of these figures regardless on whether you agree with them or whether you consider these figures real or fictional. That does not mean that you cannot take a position of which one is better(Bieber or Jesus) or which one is less worse if you prefer. Your refusal to answer to this very simple question is further evidence of your inability to discuss anything in good faith.

That is incorrect.

It is not incorrect but the fact of the matter:

Go back to the whole exercise. Why do you think that epistemologist made the addition of "true" to "justified belief" when defined knowledge? We can have a justified belief that turns out it is false (as in the previous exercise).

In the previous exercise the person's "belief" that it was thieves was not justified at all. That is your assumption that sources out of no evidence but mere prejudice. And prejudice is not a justification for anything.

We can be justified in our beliefs and know something with a high-degree of certainty and that thing can turn out to be false indeed, that does not mean we were not justified to have this belief, it simply means that our knowledge(data) was wrong, not that we were not justified.

Unjustified belief -> Faith

This is nonsense you pull out of nothing with no evidence or rational argument to that effect.

I have provided you with a very good justification for my faith in God and you have come up with nothing at all. Your physical evidence argument collapses in the face of abstract forms like a perfect line or a circle which are not physical things.

The key difference here is that you have an idea of what a perfect circle, a perfect square or a perfect line might look like even though in the real world these are constrained by physical limitations and you couldn't possibly get any of them.

A perfect line and a perfect circle are non-physical abstractions that do not exist in the real world, the only reason you "know" them is because someone taught you to use these abstractions to measure things and you require perfect forms to make accurate measurements and extrapolations. The Form of the Good is Plato's perfect form to make such extrapolations for Ethical Philosophy.

RT tried to discuss this with you in very good faith but you kept on arrogantly and rudely dismissing theology. If you had not been so arrogant and rude to him and had attempted even a basic conversation with him, I would not have interfered in here at all, just fyi, because I understand you were curious why I actually came back to this thread.

When it comes to perfect morality, you cannot model what a perfectly moral being would look like. I can conceptually call for a perfect line by stating a line is a straight one-dimensional figure having no thickness and extending infinitely in both directions. While in contrast, you cannot do the same for some morally perfect being. This is why every single god, turns out to have a moral character that "approves" of the character of those who believe in said god as I explained to you before.

Of course you can do that with God and that is exactly what Ethical Philosophers have been doing for centuries with extensive academic rigour. In fact academia as a whole came into being due to this particular exercise. Just because you are totally ignorant of it, it does not mean that it does not exist.

Explained to you why this is an exercise in futility in a previous post.

And I explained to you why you are wrong. See previous paragraph.

You know nothing of the sort as evidenced by making the same mistake over and over

That's allright mate, I have provided evidence by posting quotes of your statements and links to these statements of you insisting that one can make a claim of knowledge without making a claim of belief and me explaining to you for several pages why you are wrong, you can pretend and posture however you like but reality does not change.

This exposes the children mentality by which you are approaching this discussion....Again, I lost interest for said reason, I rather discuss something with a sincere idiot that with someone that is deceiving.

When your argument is proven wrong, admit to it like a man and move the conversation forward, do not try to deceive yourself nor the spectators, be brave enough to concede the point and move on. You keep talking about yourself in vain and spending paragraphs talking about you and me. You should stick to the points of the conversation.

"I have faith in a magical invisible pink unicorn."

I have faith that by measuring my actions and behaviour against the most perfect being that can exist, I can aspire to be better than I currently am and continue to improve myself, and others around me by example.

Astrology is not a calendar. Astrology is: is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.

I see you omitted what comes after this paragraph:

Astrology is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.[1][2][3] Astrology has been dated to at least the 2nd millennium BCE, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.[4]

Calendar is: A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years. A date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system.

A horoscope is an astrological chart or diagram representing the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, astrological aspects and sensitive angles at the time of an event, such as the moment of a person's birth. The word horoscope is derived from Greek words hõra and scopos meaning "time" and "observer" (horoskopos, pl. horoskopoi, or "marker(s) of the hour").

The astrological calendar is one of the most accurate calendars you can ever have as it uses several points of reference in the sky instead of just 1 or 2. As such it can predict time with astonishing accuracy. It is the most ancient GPS system and the system used for navigation through the planisphere in the astrolabe for millennia. In fact, Ptolemy the Greek mathematician who standardised the horoscope as we know it, is also the same man who wrote the Almagest. The zodiac is indeed first and foremost a calendar, that it is also used for divination among many other things, it does not mean that because it is being utilised for something you disagree with that it magically seizes to be a calendar.

only one has an open mind approach to this situation. I have a position that can be easily changed by evidence

Let's hope you keep an open mind going forward because up to now you have not shown any kind of open mind as you do not admit to your errors, you do not reply to the questions posed to you(Bieber or Jesus) and you do not discuss interesting and very relevant subjects such as Theology & Ontology. Instead you dismiss them, outright. Hopefully this exercise here has not been entirely in vain.

[XogGyux]

Very predictable but whether you make a choice or not it does not stop people doing exactly that with both of these figures regardless on whether you agree with them or whether you consider these figures real or fictional. That does not mean that you cannot take a position of which one is better(Bieber or Jesus) or which one is less worse if you prefer. Your refusal to answer to this very simple question is further evidence of your inability to discuss anything in good faith.

I don’t care what other people think/believe as to respect of who of those two characters is more moral or better or anything else. I don’t have to make a choice, you don’t have to make a choice and it is in fact a silly exercise as I’ll shall demonstrate once I get down to another quote of yours further down your post so wait for it .

Your refusal to answer to this very simple question is further evidence of your inability to discuss anything in good faith.

Again, you seem to go through life thinking that you have to make decisions at gunpoint. “YOU HAVE TO MAKE A CHOICE BETWEEN BELIEVING A GOD EXISTS OR BELIEVING A GOD DOES NOT EXISTS” hold your horses my friend, you have another choice... which is to not make a choice and simply withold belief on either one option until the evidence is available.

It is not incorrect but the fact of the matter:

In the previous exercise the person's "belief" that it was thieves was not justified at all. That is your assumption that sources out of no evidence but mere prejudice. And prejudice is not a justification for anything.

We can be justified in our beliefs and know something with a high-degree of certainty and that thing can turn out to be false indeed, that does not mean we were not justified to have this belief, it simply means that our knowledge(data) was wrong, not that we were not justified.

You are wrong. Refer to previous post for the explanation. I will not continue chasing your tail as I stated before.

This is nonsense you pull out of nothing with no evidence or rational argument to that effect.

There is no position that I cannot take on faith. Everything, no matter how absurd, can be taken of faith. Thus faith is unreliable and thus beliefs based solely on faith are unjustified. Whether you want to admit it or not is another issue altogether, but if 2nd year surgeon resident offered you to do a triple bypass and tell you “don’t worry, I have faith I can do the surgery” I am sure you’d be saying no thanks, go away.

A perfect line and a perfect circle are non-physical abstractions that do not exist in the real world, the only reason you "know" them is because someone taught you to use these abstractions to measure things and you require perfect forms to make accurate measurements and extrapolations. The Form of the Good is Plato's perfect form to make such extrapolations for Ethical Philosophy.

RT tried to discuss this with you in very good faith but you kept on arrogantly and rudely dismissing theology. If you had not been so arrogant and rude to him and had attempted even a basic conversation with him, I would not have interfered in here at all, just fyi, because I understand you were curious why I actually came back to this thread.

Again, you still miss the point and not address the problems with your position. You can imagine some perfect objects because you have a definition of what a perfect object would be. You have a definition for a perfect point. You have a definition for a perfect line, you have a definition for a perfect pendulum, you have a definition for a perfect surface with no friction, etc. You don’t have a definition for a perfect moral being, more accurately, whatever definition you have, is only yours personally and not compatible with someone’s else’s and thus meaningless because it is merely a reflection of your own beliefs. The “perfect” ideal being for a devout Jehova’s witness abhors blood transfusions and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Christian views abortion as an abomination and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Muslim wants to cover women’s faces or hair and does not like pork. This is an exercise in futility if you are merely comparing yourself against yourself. The day we can put god in a test tube and poke it and measure it and ask it/him/her/them questions, then that day you could possibly have a point.

Of course you can do that with God and that is exactly what Ethical Philosophers have been doing for centuries with extensive academic rigour. In fact academia as a whole came into being due to this particular exercise. Just because you are totally ignorant of it, it does not mean that it does not exist.

Really? Show me, Show me what a perfect ethical/moral god looks like. Because the day that we have a perfect ethical/moral being of any kind we can stop investigating about ethics and moral because such being will have all the answers.

And I explained to you why you are wrong. See previous paragraph.

You are incorrect. See last 2 paragraphs and previous post.

When your argument is proven wrong, admit to it like a man and move the conversation forward, do not try to deceive yourself nor the spectators, be brave enough to concede the point and move on.

When/If my argument is proven wrong I will. In the meantime I’ll keep skipping dumb basic shit that has been discussed extensively. My patience is limited, while I see value in having honest discussion for the benefit of possible by-standers, I do not like exercise in futility and anyone that is sincere about critically analyzing these problems can easily understand what I have stated, it is certainly not rocket science, in fact it is quite basic. I regret wasting days discussing the most basic definitions of words/concepts with you but I had some higher expectations. The good news is that I learned something, I should value my time a little bit more and use it more selectively, rather than assuming the other person in the discussion truly wants to have an honest discussion.

I see you omitted what comes after this paragraph:

I see you omitted what comes after this paragraph:

Again as usual you are wrong even on basic definitions. Physics study particles but it is not a particle. Astrology might study calendars, but it is not a calendar (like you said ). “Astrology is the study of movement and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.” That is the definition, what comes behind is not part of the definition but an explanation of its Origen. I am not trying to hide anything like you are suggesting.

The astrological calendar is one of the most accurate calendars you can ever have as it uses several points of reference in the sky instead of just 1 or 2. As such it can predict time with astonishing accuracy. It is the most ancient GPS system and the system used for navigation through the planisphere in the astrolabe for millennia. In fact, Ptolemy the Greek mathematician who standardised the horoscope as we know it, is also the same man who wrote the Almagest. The zodiac is indeed first and foremost a calendar, that it is also used for divination among many other things, it does not mean that because it is being utilised for something you disagree with that it magically seizes to be a calendar.

I don’t think you understood the point I tried to make earlier with alchemy and astrology. I readily acknowledged earlier that even through misguided beliefs, you could end up sparking advancement. It does not mean that the original beliefs are not misguided (they are) or are worth keeping once you have a better understanding. Alchemy for instance could be said to have served as the spark for chemistry and physics. Alchemy is still misguided. Astrology gave us multiple calendars, I fact I mentioned pre-Colombian civilizations prior, but also Chinese calendars and Arabic calendars. The Arabs were the foremost experts of their time and they named most of the stars, Steven Weinberg has made a very good argument that Neil Degrase Tyson has put into a beautiful mini-rant of how religion (in this case Islam) managed to cripple the advancements of the Islamic civilization. Shall I link it? Ha! Who are we kidding, I’m going to link it for sure:

And you are being deceitful, It is not that astrology is being misused, the whole purpose of astrology is misguided as a whole. Look up the definition “The study of the movement and relative position of celestial as a mean of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events” There is no such thing as movement of mercury or Jupiter making us sad or giving us luck. The whole discipline (if you can call it that) is a hoax. Did it help seed/spark astronomy? Sure... did it inspire people into creating calendars and naming planets/stars again, sure. But just like a fool can be useful and still be a fool, astrology might have helped spark interest into the scientific study of the cosmos but it is still a misguided hoax.
Want another example? Phrenology. Silly “study” of how the shape of the cranium correlates to mental abilities. Every psychology and some of Neuro anatomy classes that I have taken to date as some point make a tiny 1-2 mins mention of this “discipline” as part of the history and perhaps as a curiosity/joke.
Religion is to philosophy and sciences what alchemy is to physics and chemistry, what astrology is to astronomy and what phrenology is to Neuro anatomy. A sort of superstitious crazy uncle.

Let's hope you keep an open mind going forward because up to now you have not shown any kind of open mind as you do not admit to your errors, you do not reply to the questions posed to you(Bieber or Jesus) and you do not discuss interesting and very relevant subjects such as Theology & Ontology. Instead you dismiss them, outright. Hopefully this exercise here has not been entirely in vain.

I promessed you at the beginning that I was going to entertain your “Bieber vs Jesus” smack down:

So here is my answer:

First as I have told you before, comparing moral characters between two subjects is problematic. Who is more moral a rapist or a murderer? A thief or a liar? Someone who embezzled and killed or someone who kidnapped and tortured? Judging moral actions is a little bit easier but not entirely without difficulties.

When it comes to your example, the first thing to do is to know the characters in questions. I know a bit about the Jesus of the Bible as I have read it, but I suspect this is not the Jesus that you are referring to as we will see soon. However, I do not know shit about Bieber and I am not going to look up information about him just for this exercise. Literally all I know is that he sings teenage music, likes to show up his bare chest, has some tattoos and used to have a ridiculous haircut. Nothing that points towards his moral character (unless you think bangs are the work of the devil).

But lets analyze the moral character of the Jesus of the Bible for a second. This is a character that when asked about slavery replies with “slaves obey your masters, and do it with a smile on your face” (I’m paraphrasing here, but you can look it up Colossians 3:22). Not a very morally thing to do I may say. Also, this is a character that has magic powers, it is not clear on the readings if he has a limit or if this power is drained by being used, etc. If it has no limit, it is pretty petty of him for not using it to end poverty, slavery, rape, hunger, misery, diseases, etc. If it is limited, then it is quite wasteful of him to waste it transmogrifying water into Booz and walking on water, we have David Blaine for that.

Now, I understand that this is not the character that you hold in a pedestal. And that is precisely the point why people should not be idolizing anything/anyone. That is how dictators such as Kim Jong Un are created. I understand that you only focus on the “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbor” guy. And that is great. But this is only one face of the character described.

You wouldn’t want me to make a decision at this point in this comparison.

[noemon]

I don’t care what other people think/believe as to respect of who of those two characters is more moral or better or anything else. I don’t have to make a choice, you don’t have to make a choice and it is in fact a silly exercise as I’ll shall demonstrate once I get down to another quote of yours further down your post so wait for it .

You do not care to participate in a dialogue you mean and reply to the questions your interlocutor poses to you despite the fact that you blame your interlocutor for allegedly ignoring your questions several times as an argumentative tactic even when he doesn't.

You are wrong. Refer to previous post for the explanation. I will not continue chasing your tail as I stated before.

Prejudice is not a justification. Your argument maintains that the person is justified to assume it was thieves because the person has heard that thieves have operated in the area, replace that with Black people and see how your argument of prejudice is quite ridiculous and a justification for various forms of prejudice. Assessing a situation based on prejudice is not acting on evidence as you claim.

There is no position that I cannot take on faith. Everything, no matter how absurd, can be taken of faith. Thus faith is unreliable and thus beliefs based solely on faith are unjustified.

Like most if not all of your arguments this one too is absurd, taking the absurdist stance seems to be your default when you have nothing substantial to say. In plain translation you are saying:

"Noemon, your justification for faith could be reasonable but if I accept it I will be justifying the murderer for using faith to commit murders."

This is absurd and in this case very evidently a logical fallacy.

Again, you still miss the point and not address the problems with your position. You can imagine some perfect objects because you have a definition of what a perfect object would be. You have a definition for a perfect point. You have a definition for a perfect line, you have a definition for a perfect pendulum, you have a definition for a perfect surface with no friction, etc. You don’t have a definition for a perfect moral being, more accurately, whatever definition you have, is only yours personally and not compatible with someone’s else’s and thus meaningless because it is merely a reflection of your own beliefs. The “perfect” ideal being for a devout Jehova’s witness abhors blood transfusions and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Christian views abortion as an abomination and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Muslim wants to cover women’s faces or hair and does not like pork. This is an exercise in futility if you are merely comparing yourself against yourself. The day we can put god in a test tube and poke it and measure it and ask it/him/her/them questions, then that day you could possibly have a point.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Neoplatonists and a huge bulk of modern and pre-modern philosophers take Aristotle's definition of God as the standard & accepted one. For the purposes of this exercise and to avoid complexity, Anselms' refined definition which I haver already used suffices to provide a definition that we can work with: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."

Really? Show me, Show me what a perfect ethical/moral god looks like. Because the day that we have a perfect ethical/moral being of any kind we can stop investigating about ethics and moral because such being will have all the answers.

Once again with the absurdism, your argument is equivalent to that because we have the perfect ruler, we can stop measuring because we have measured everything. Sprinkled with your ignorance that the entire ground of Ethical Philosophy is in fact predicated on such a Perfect Hypothesis.

When/If my argument is proven wrong I will.

Your argument was proven wrong beyond any doubt and instead of accepting it, you accused me childish vanity for pointing the fact out to you.

This argument of yours:

Wether we call it “knowledge” colloquially is of no consequence as the fact is, epistemically speaking, this is not technically knowledge as we lack information. Your dismissal is thus unwarranted.

Again as usual you are wrong even on basic definitions. Physics study particles but it is not a particle. Astrology might study calendars, but it is not a calendar. “Astrology is the study of movement and relative positions of celestial objects as a means of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events.” That is the definition, what comes behind is not part of the definition but an explanation of its Origen. I am not trying to hide anything like you are suggesting.

Once again you are being obtuse and you are doing that in order to mask the fallacy of your own original argument which sought to dichotomise(oh dear!) astrology and calendars. My general use of the term astrology was meant to highlight that very obvious relationship(which you now admit that astrology can be said to be the study of calendars) and my further explanation demonstrated very clearly why your original dichotomy was patently false. I can already sense the torrent of anger that you will unleash here with several insults, denials and redefinitions of the term dichotomy, astrology, calendars, what you supposedly originally meant by pitting them against each other(calendar, astrology) which you have repeated ad nauseam in several posts because it clearly makes you feel good and which you repeat again for the nth time below:

I don’t think you understood the point I tried to make earlier with alchemy and astrology. I readily acknowledge earlier that even through misguided beliefs, you could end up sparking advancement.

I have not misunderstood your point at all, you have made it way too many times and I have already instructed you ["If ranting about Alchemy makes you feel good, do not forget to do it again in your next post"] several posts ago to make it as many times as you wish since it clearly makes you feel really good about yourself. However the misunderstanding is yours as clearly demonstrated in the previous paragraph.

It does not mean that the original beliefs are not misguided (they are) or are worth keeping once you have a better understanding. Alchemy for instance could be said to have served as the spark for chemistry and physics. Alchemy is still misguided.

Alchemy is not merely the spark for chemistry but its factual progenitor and alchemy which is the study of chemistry for the transformation of objects has already been proven as today we do have the ability to chemically transform objects. Alchemy evolved into chemistry and dismissing the previous stage of evolution is what is misguided.

Astrology gave us multiple calendars,

Indeed, and that is why your attempt to issue a dichotomy between astrology and calendars was misguided:

Yeah, this is still not a method by which you can examine and differenciate belief in different supernatural claims (magic invisible pink unicorn, god, astrology, etc). The first step to measure something is to use an instrument that actually exists (ruler, beaker, odometer, calendar, etc)

I fact I mentioned pre-Colombian civilizations prior, but also Chinese calendars and Arabic calendars. The Arabs were the foremost experts of their time and they named most of the stars, Steven Weinberg has made a very good argument that Neil Degrase Tyson has put into a beautiful mini-rant of how religion (in this case Islam) managed to cripple the advancements of the Islamic civilization. Shall I link it? Ha! Who are we kidding, I’m going to link it for sure:

Once again you are ranting just to yourself for no particular reason, you came up with what you believe to be a point you can score against religion and since you have lost all other points you have tried to make, you thought "hey let me try this new thing now". Of course you cannot even see the irony of the argument that the "Golden Age of Islam collapsed because of Islam" because of your bias and nor are you capable to recognise that the Golden Age and the Collapse took place within Islam and as such Islam in itself might not be responsible for either. When western civilisation eventually collapses under the weight of excessive gluttony will you accept the argument that atheism and nihilism led to its collapse? Do you even accept the argument that western civilisation is so awesome precisely because of Christianity and Aristotelian and Platonic Philosophy and their explicit Theism? I can already see New New Atheists arguing that since atheism is a rejection of christian and Greek theism that it was doomed for the start and that christian and Greek theism were in fact the problem with atheism as atheism operated within their constraints.

And you are being deceitful, It is not that astrology is being misused, the whole purpose of astrology is misguided as a whole. Look up the definition “The study of the movement and relative position of celestial as a mean of divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events” There is no such thing as movement of mercury or Jupiter making us sad or giving us luck.

The weather and the seasons affect humanity and the earth quite a lot on a physical level and the seasons are greatly dependent on the areas relative position on our solar system. Observing these effects and documenting them is in fact the greatest human achievement. To be able to relate ourselves with our position in the cosmos. It is such a monumental exercise based on painstaking observation that builds up on millennia of work that is prone to errors indeed. But the philosophy of it and its base axioms that we are parts of a greater whole and that our relative position in the cosmos matters are simply wonderful. The argument that our relative position in the cosmos does not matter for human at all is in fact a ridiculous argument that is not only wrong(as the seasons and the meteorological phenomena clearly prove) but even if it weren't we would have to exhaust all the possibilities and assert this hypothesis anyway.

A sort of superstitious crazy uncle.

Its the daddy that raised them in his household and taught all the things they know. They can insult him all they like, but they would not exist without him at all.

But this is only one face of the character described. You wouldn’t want me to make a decision at this point in this comparison.

Of course I would. That is all cute about trying to trash-talk the character of Jesus while claiming ignorance for Bieber as well as various other assumptions you make about me, but answer the question please, does that mean you claim Justin Bieber is a better role model than Jesus?

[XogGyux]

You do not care to participate in a dialogue you mean and reply to the questions your interlocutor poses to you despite the fact that you blame your interlocutor for allegedly ignoring your questions several times as an argumentative tactic even when he doesn't.

I did, in fact, participate in your dialogue at the end of the post as I told you I would. And also explained to you the logistics for my position.

Prejudice is not a justification. Your argument maintains that the person is justified to assume it was thieves because the person has heard that thieves have operated in the area, replace that with Black people and see how your argument of prejudice is quite ridiculous and a justification for various forms of prejudice. Assessing a situation based on prejudice is not acting on evidence as you claim.

LOL the irony that you are trying to lecture me about prejudice and in the same paragraph you seemingly substitute thieves for black. Someone needs a bit of soul searching .
OK that was a cheap shot, but you were asking for it, don't worry I won't hold you to that. The point that you missed is that calling a thief a thief is not being prejudiced, a thief is a thief by definition. Calling a black man/woman a thief, might, in fact, be prejudice if it is done without evidence, if you in fact have a video camera recording identifying and documenting the robbery/burglary then you are not being prejudiced by caling that particular man a thief regardless of whether he is black or not.

Like most if not all of your arguments this one too is absurd, taking the absurdist stance seems to be your default when you have nothing substantial to say. In plain translation you are saying:

"Noemon, your justification for faith could be reasonable but if I accept it I will be justifying the murderer for using faith to commit murders."

LOL you talk (write) as if there have not been millions of people that have not done EXACTLY that.

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Neoplatonists and a huge bulk of modern and pre-modern philosophers take Aristotle's definition of God as the standard & accepted one. For the purposes of this exercise and to avoid complexity, Anselms' refined definition one form of which I haver already used suffices to provide a definition that we can work with: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."

Sure. Now explain what is that being that nothing can be greater than it. Explain and describe its characteristics and moral character. While you are at it, show a few examples of how such greater being would rule when it come to some of our modern era ethical and moral conflict, how such being would deal with world hunger, diseases, how such being would rule on abortion or on gay sex or on threesomes/orgies, how such being would rule on artificial life extension and on consented euthanasia/assisted suicide.

Once again with the absurdism, your argument is equivalent to that because we have the perfect ruler, we can stop measuring because we have measured everything.

NO actually it is "we have the perfect rule, we can stop using the imperfect ones". So I guess if you have a perfect moral being then we don't need to study our imperfect pesky imperfect morals and ethics right? I mean that is the whole point of your premise, one that of course I do not accept, but this is where your proposition leads.
I, in fact, don't think you have any perfect being or anything but I am following your delusion to where it leads.

Sprinkled with your ignorance that the entire ground of Ethical Philosophy is in fact predicated on such a Perfect Hypothesis.

Yes, I aways enjoy ethical philosophy when it is sprinkled with a little bit of ignorance, vinegar and salt.
Actually not. My whole point is that the only thing that makes our moral character better is studying ethics and morality, not comparing yourself with imaginary beings. So if soemone is dismissing the ground of ethical philosophy it is you. If you have a perfect moral being with perfect morality, you can use that as a measure, it is a perfect ruler after all right? why use the slightly crooked one that we have? Don't you like your lines perfectly straight and moral? (I just thought of a gay line joke !)

Your argument was proven wrong beyond any doubt and instead of accepting it, you accused me childish vanity for pointing the fact out to you.

This argument of yours:

Once again you are being obtuse and you are doing that in order to mask the fallacy of your own original argument which sought to dichotomise(oh dear!) astrology and calendars. My general use of the term astrology was meant to highlight that very obvious relationship(which you now admit that astrology can be said to be the study of calendars) and my further explanation demonstrated very clearly why your original dichotomy was patently false. I can already sense the torrent of anger that you will unleash here with several insults, denials and redefinitions of the term dichotomy, astrology, calendars, what you supposedly originally meant by pitting them against each other(calendar, astrology) which you have repeated ad nauseam in several posts because it clearly makes you feel good and which you repeat again for the nth time below:

Only you and you alone equated astrology with calendar.

You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have.

I won't make the font bigger or highlight it so that you don't freak out .
Astrology is not a calendar.
And please don't start with dichotomy this dichotomy that, you have no clue what a dichotomy is or how they are used and I already had nightmares about this last time so I will ignore anything you say about dichotomies for the rest of the year. I simply could not care less about what you have to say about dichotomies.

I have not misunderstood your point at all, you have made it way too many times and I have already instructed you ["If ranting about Alchemy makes you feel good, do not forget to do it again in your next post"] several posts ago to make it as many times as you wish since it clearly makes you feel really good about yourself. However the misunderstanding is yours as clearly demonstrated in the previous paragraph.

Alchemy is not merely the spark for chemistry but its factual progenitor and alchemy which is the study of chemistry for the transformation of objects has already been proven as today we do have the ability to chemically transform objects. Alchemy evolved into chemistry and dismissing the previous stage of evolution is what is misguided.

You don't have anything nice to say about phrenology?
Over the pages, you have already defended the most obvious fraudulent religions such as Scientology and Mormonism, last post defending astrology and now defending alchemy. At this rate of delusion expansion, by September I'll have you wearing a tin foil hat Dowsing for bigfoot to read him the tea leaves.

Indeed, and that is why your attempt to issue a dichotomy between astrology and calendars was misguided:

I am about to vomit now.
Does your brain work by lose associations?

Once again you are ranting just to yourself for no particular reason, you came up with what you believe to be a point you can score against religion and since you have lost all other points you have tried to make, you thought "hey let me try this new thing now". Of course you cannot even see the irony of the argument that the "Golden Age of Islam collapsed because of Islam" because of your bias and nor are you capable to recognise that the Golden Age and the Collapse took place within Islam and as such Islam in itself might not be responsible for either. When western civilisation eventually collapses under the weight of excessive gluttony will you accept the argument that atheism and nihilism led to its collapse? Do you even accept the argument that western civilisation is so awesome precisely because of Christianity and Aristotelian and Platonic Philosophy and their explicit Theism? I can already see New New Atheists arguing that since atheism is a rejection of christian and Greek theism that it was doomed for the start and that christian and Greek theism were in fact the problem with atheism as atheism operated within their constraints.

Sure, you missed the point entirely.

Of course I would. That is all cute about trying to trash-talk the character of Jesus while claiming ignorance for Bieber as well as various other assumptions you make about me, but answer the question please, does that mean you choose Justin Bieber over Jesus?

Depend on the situation, if we are going to a party, I think Jesus would be more useful, the guests would surely enjoy the magic snacks and the booz.

[noemon]

I did, in fact, participate in your dialogue at the end of the post as I told you I would. And also explained to you the logistics for my position....Depend on the situation, if we are going to a party, I think Jesus would be more useful, the guests would surely enjoy the magic snacks and the booz

You did not reply to the question that was posed to you. As I predicted you would, you dodged it and you still do. You cannot even abide by your own debating ethics. Ethics for you is just a buzzword with no meaning.

LOL the irony that you are trying to lecture me about prejudice and in the same paragraph you seemingly substitute thieves for black. Someone needs a bit of soul searching .
OK that was a cheap shot, but you were asking for it, don't worry I won't hold you to that. The point that you missed is that calling a thief a thief is not being prejudiced, a thief is a thief by definition. Calling a black man/woman a thief, might, in fact, be prejudice if it is done without evidence, if you in fact have a video camera recording identifying and documenting the robbery/burglary then you are not being prejudiced by caling that particular man a thief regardless of whether he is black or not.

Calling someone/anyone a thief without any evidence just like you did in your example, is in fact prejudice. And prejudice is not a justification. Your argument is false and you should get over it instead of trying to take cheap shots.

LOL you talk (write) as if there have not been millions of people that have not done EXACTLY that.

The same kind of people that take absurd positions.

Sure. Now explain what is that being that nothing can be greater than it. Explain and describe its characteristics and moral character. While you are at it, show a few examples of how such greater being would rule when it come to some of our modern era ethical and moral conflict, how such being would deal with world hunger, diseases, how such being would rule on abortion or on gay sex or on threesomes/orgies, how such being would rule on artificial life extension and on consented euthanasia/assisted suicide.

Our primary and current argument -in case you forgot already- is whether this definition is as valid as the definition of a straight line, which is as we said an abstract concept defined to measure things, this definition of God serves the equivalent purpose in Ethical Philosophy and Metaphysics. Once you accept this proposition as valid we can then move on to the next stage of using this proposition to conduct our exercises.

NO actually it is "we have the perfect rule, we can stop using the imperfect ones".

That is not what you said earlier so I guess you understand your previous argument is once again false, I am fine with this new analogy as it does not affect the argument at all.

So I guess if you have a perfect moral being then we don't need to study our imperfect pesky imperfect morals and ethics right? I mean that is the whole point of your premise, one that of course I do not accept, but this is where your proposition leads.

Why are you trying to project your own argument onto me? That is what you said and I said absolutely no and demonstrated to you the absurdity of such an argument. Just like our measurements with a ruler never stops, so with morality this exercise never stops either.

Actually not. My whole point is that the only thing that makes our moral character better is studying ethics and morality, not comparing yourself with imaginary beings. So if soemone is dismissing the ground of ethical philosophy it is you. If you have a perfect moral being with perfect morality, you can use that as a measure, it is a perfect ruler after all right? why use the slightly crooked one that we have? Don't you like your lines perfectly straight and moral? (I just thought of a gay line joke !)

I don't know if you are intellectually incapable, totally ignorant or simply unwilling to have a proper conversation on the subject.

I simply could not care less about what you have to say about dichotomies.

It's good that you accept it quickly this time, that your dichotomy between astrology and calendar was absolutely false once again. Good for you. You will not tire us like before. Whether you accept it or not, your quote is there for all to see where you put astrology and calendar in distinct and diametrically opposite categories making them mutually exclusive once again, in error just like before.

Over the pages, you have already defended the most obvious fraudulent religions such as Scientology and Mormonism,

I would please ask you to not lie about me. It is extremely rude and you should at least have the basic ethics to abide by this standard human decency.

last post defending astrology and now defending alchemy.Dowsing for bigfoot to read him the tea leaves.

This is called an ad-hom and it is a logical fallacy.

Sure, you missed the point entirely.

The point you made that Islam is responsible for the collapse of the Golden Age of Islam has been shown to be false. If you want to make another one, feel free.

[XogGyux]

You did not reply to the question that was posed to you. As I predicted you would, you dodged it and you still do. You cannot even abide by your own debating ethics. Ethics for you is just a buzzword with no meaning.

Actually, I did, it might not have been to your satisfaction, but that is irrelevant. You'll find out that the real world does not subject itself to your whims. As much as you would want my answer to be given in a very particular way you will have to deal with what you are given. Just in the same way as wishing an God or Santa will not materialize either figure into reality. Get used to that feeling, it will keep happening. And I find it amusing that you keep saying "I predict" as if you were some kind of prophetic figure or if this gives you any credibility. I predict you will continue to be stubborn and misusing basic terms/words etc.

Calling someone/anyone a thief without any evidence just like you did in your example, is in fact prejudice. And prejudice is not a justification. Your argument is false and you should get over it instead of trying to take cheap shots.

Calling a thief a thief is not prejudiced. It would be if you call a non-thief a thief. A thief that stole stuff from 9 houses does not stop being a thief because he/she did not steal from the 10th. He could, in fact, be the lead suspect and be part of the investigation that might ultimately find him guilty or non-guilty. But there is no prejudice. So if in a neighborhood there is a famous thief that stole from multiple houses, and then we come to another and we are tentatively entertaining the idea that this other house was burglarized, there is no prejudice if we are also considering the possibility that a thief did it. It would be prejudice if you would assume a black man did it, or perhaps it would be prejudiced to assume your loud annoying neighbor did it.
Assuming that a murder was committed by a murderer is not prejudice. You could, in fact, be incorrect that a burglary or a murder occurred at all, but that is an entirely different point.

The same kind of people that take absurd positions.

You mean the same kind of people that justify alchemy, astrology, phrenology, scientology, mormonism, belief in ghosts, yeti, bigfoot, anti-vaccine and any sort of "my god is better than yours and I cannot accept for a second that you don't believe in my god and you believe in some other sort of god that unlike mine, was made up? You know, the evidence is clear on this, religion and faith has been used to justify just as many (some would argue more) despicable acts as good acts. As Steven Weinberg put it

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Truer words have not been uttered on the matter.
You seem to forget, or perhaps did not know, that the early christians were prosecuted and even put to death in this very fashion. In fact, they were amongst the very first to receive the label of "atheist". Then of course, when Christians became the powerful ones they did the prosecuting themselves, but that is just history going in circles for you.

Our primary and current argument -in case you forgot already- is whether this definition is as valid as the definition of a straight line, which is as we said an abstract concept defined to measure things, this definition of God serves the equivalent purpose in Ethical Philosophy and Metaphysics. Once you accept this proposition as valid we can then move on to the next stage of using this proposition to conduct our exercises.

I noticed the inconspicuous absence of the examples that I requested. Something that I knew (I predicted HA!) you could not provide, after all, that's what happens when you try to pump morality out of a fictitious entity.

That is not what you said earlier so I guess you understand your previous argument is once again false, I am fine with this new analogy as it does not affect the argument at all.

LOL false accusation aside, yes it does. Under your paradigm, you don't need humans then to systematically study ethics, because why bother using our imperfect set of rulers when you have access to a celestial perfect one.
As I have said prior, this offcourse is false, you do not have any access what so ever to the celestial ruler, to the perfect being, to god and thus your whole argument for using god as a measure for morality is bogus but I am glad you now understand why. I am kidding ofcourse I "predict" you will not understand, touche!

Why are you trying to project your own argument onto me? That is what you said and I said absolutely no and demonstrated to you the absurdity of such an argument. Just like our measurements with a ruler never stops, so with morality this exercise never stops either.

Please explain in detail how is it that when you are imagining this perfect being you can get a moral answer from it or how you can compare two similar actions to determine the most moral. That is the whole purpose, right? This is the reason that you reflect into this "ideal" perfection right? So if it cannot help you reach your goal, if it does not help you in the betterment of yourself, the whole exercise is one of futility.

I don't know if you are intellectually incapable, totally ignorant or simply unwilling to have a proper conversation on the subject.

It's good that you accept it quickly this time, that your dichotomy between astrology and calendar was absolutely false once again.

You brought it up, I guess you are the expert on false statements.

You will not tire us like before.

Oh thank you all powerful invisible pink unicorn for this gift you have bestow upon me!

Whether you accept it or not, your quote is there for all to see where you put astrology and calendar in distinct and diametrically opposite categories making them mutually exclusive once again, in error just like before.

Noemon says:

You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have.

Be careful what you say next, I'll make this quote of yours my signature if you keep behaving like a petulant child. You can: 1- be a grown adult and admit you were mistaken, 2- you can simply shut up and move along with the conversation without accusing me of what you did when I have proof of you doing it or 3-. keep behaving like a petulant child and this goes straight to my signature, so you cannot avoid it ever again. Your move now.

This is called an ad-hom and it is a logical fallacy.

Moderator Edit: Rule 2 Violation
I said:

You don't have anything nice to say about phrenology?
Over the pages, you have already defended the most obvious fraudulent religions such as Scientology and Mormonism, last post defending astrology and now defending alchemy. At this rate of delusion expansion, by September I'll have you wearing a tin foil hat Dowsing for bigfoot to read him the tea leaves.

This is called an ad-hom and it is a logical fallacy

You are incorrect.

The point you made that Islam is responsible for the collapse of the Golden Age of Islam has been shown to be false.

Really? It has been shown to be false?

Finally.
I know you feel that you need to defend your religion and baby jesus. But at this point, you have to reflect on whether continuing this discussion in the unsincere and amateurish way that you have done so far helps your point at all? Sometimes when you are dealt the losing hand the best thing is to not keep adding money to the stockpile.
Don't get me wrong, I find this conversation exhilarating and I am convinced it is helping my cause.

[noemon]

Actually, I did, it might not have been to your satisfaction, but that is irrelevant. You'll find out that the real world does not subject itself to your whims. As much as you would want my answer to be given in a very particular way you will have to deal with what you are given. Just in the same way as wishing an God or Santa will not materialize either figure into reality. Get used to that feeling, it will keep happening. And I find it amusing that you keep saying "I predict" as if you were some kind of prophetic figure or if this gives you any credibility. I predict you will continue to be stubborn and misusing basic terms/words etc.

Which person is a better role model Justin Bieber or Jesus Christ? I understand why you are scared shitless to answer the question and as I predicted you will say neither, you will try to say that you do not have to reply to the question, you will say that people should not have role-models at all, you will cry, shout, scream, and insult me instead of reply to this basic question. At the same time you will spend pages and pages accusing me of not replying to your own question when in fact I am responding to them explicitly and directly. As I told RT in the beginning, there is no intellectual conversation to be had with you. This is merely demonstrating this fact.

Calling a thief a thief is not prejudiced. It would be if you call a non-thief a thief.
A thief that stole stuff from 9 houses does not stop being a thief because he/she did not steal from the 10th. He could, in fact, be the lead suspect and be part of the investigation that might ultimately find him guilty or non-guilty. But there is no prejudice. So if in a neighborhood there is a famous thief that stole from multiple houses, and then we come to another and we are tentatively entertaining the idea that this other house was burglarized, there is no prejudice if we are also considering the possibility that a thief did it. It would be prejudice if you would assume a black man did it, or perhaps it would be prejudiced to assume your loud annoying neighbor did it.
Assuming that a murder was committed by a murderer is not prejudice.

I don't know why you keep ranting irrelevancies. Your original argument about the thief was not based on any evidence but on prejudice. You did not have wrong data but merely your own prejudiced assumption, you had no data at all that a thief broke into the house. As such your belief that a thief did break into the house was not justified at all.

You know, the evidence is clear on this, religion and faith has been used to justify just as many (some would argue more) despicable acts as good acts.

Absurd people believing on their own absurdities and incapable of having a rational conversation can evidently be found among all varieties just like you keep proving with your demeanour post after post.

I noticed the inconspicuous absence of the examples that I requested. Something that I knew (I predicted HA!) you could not provide, after all, that's what happens when you try to pump morality out of a fictitious entity.

I noticed you made this argument:

Again, you still miss the point and not address the problems with your position. You can imagine some perfect objects because you have a definition of what a perfect object would be. You have a definition for a perfect point. You have a definition for a perfect line, you have a definition for a perfect pendulum, you have a definition for a perfect surface with no friction, etc. You don’t have a definition for a perfect moral being, more accurately, whatever definition you have, is only yours personally and not compatible with someone’s else’s and thus meaningless because it is merely a reflection of your own beliefs. The “perfect” ideal being for a devout Jehova’s witness abhors blood transfusions and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Christian views abortion as an abomination and the “perfect” ideal being for a fundamentalist Muslim wants to cover women’s faces or hair and does not like pork. This is an exercise in futility if you are merely comparing yourself against yourself. The day we can put god in a test tube and poke it and measure it and ask it/him/her/them questions, then that day you could possibly have a point.

You received a response that addressed your request for a definition and your fallacious claim about Jewish, Christian, Muslims and Western Theology:

Christians, Jews, Muslims, Neoplatonists and a huge bulk of modern and pre-modern philosophers take Aristotle's definition of God as the standard & accepted one. For the purposes of this exercise and to avoid complexity, Anselms' refined definition which I haver already used suffices to provide a definition that we can work with: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."

Now you are trying to change the subject and goalpost.

LOL false accusation aside, yes it does. Under your paradigm, you don't need humans then to systematically study ethics, because why bother using our imperfect set of rulers when you have access to a celestial perfect one.

Seems like you are losing your words once again, let's try to keep you honest:

You said initially:

Really? Show me, Show me what a perfect ethical/moral god looks like. Because the day that we have a perfect ethical/moral being of any kind we can stop investigating about ethics and moral because such being will have all the answers.

You were told:

Once again with the absurdism, your argument is equivalent to that because we have the perfect ruler, we can stop measuring because we have measured everything.Sprinkled with your ignorance that the entire ground of Ethical Philosophy is in fact predicated on such a Perfect Hypothesis.

Then you changed your argument realising your own fallacy:

NO actually it is "we have the perfect rule, we can stop using the imperfect ones".

To which I replied that I do not mind as it does not affect the argument. Indeed, we can use the perfect ruler so that we measure our behaviour & conduct with that ruler, nothing here implies that we should stop performing that exercise and honing our morality and ethics as you claim:

NO actually it is "we have the perfect rule, we can stop using the imperfect ones". So I guess if you have a perfect moral being then we don't need to study our imperfect pesky imperfect morals and ethics right? I mean that is the whole point of your premise, one that of course I do not accept, but this is where your proposition leads.
I, in fact, don't think you have any perfect being or anything but I am following your delusion to where it leads.

Not right as clearly explained to you in the preceding paragraph.

Please explain in detail how is it that when you are imagining this perfect being you can get a moral answer from it or how you can compare two similar actions to determine the most moral. That is the whole purpose, right? This is the reason that you reflect into this "ideal" perfection right? So if it cannot help you reach your goal, if it does not help you in the betterment of yourself, the whole exercise is one of futility.

Once you accept Anselm's proposition as valid I will, for without a point of reference you will simply dismiss everything I say.

Noemon says:

This:

Once again you are being obtuse and you are doing that in order to mask the fallacy of your own original argument which sought to dichotomise(oh dear!) astrology and calendars. My general use of the term astrology was meant to highlight that very obvious relationship(which you now admit that astrology can be said to be the study of calendars) and my further explanation demonstrated very clearly why your original dichotomy was patently false. I can already sense the torrent of anger that you will unleash here with several insults, denials and redefinitions of the term dichotomy, astrology, calendars, what you supposedly originally meant by pitting them against each other(calendar, astrology) which you have repeated ad nauseam in several posts because it clearly makes you feel good and which you repeat again for the nth time below.

I said:
You are incorrect.

Falsely accusing me that I defended Scientology and Mormonism and insisting on such a lie is very rude and indeed an ad-hom. If you can respond to this argument about Alchemy and Astrology you are more than welcome to do so without insults and ad-homs but clearly you do not have an argument and you actually believe that you can threaten me or insult me into submission.

On astrology:

The weather and the seasons affect humanity and the earth quite a lot on a physical level and the seasons are greatly dependent on an area's relative position to the cosmos. Observing these effects and documenting them is in fact the greatest human achievement. To be able to relate ourselves to our position in the cosmos. It is such a monumental exercise based on painstaking observations that build up on millennia of work and that is prone to many errors indeed especially when you are going from the macro(constellations, planets, stars) down to the micro(human patterns). But the philosophy of it and its base axioms that we are parts of a greater whole and that our relative position in the cosmos actually matters are simply wonderful. The argument that our relative position in the cosmos does not matter to humans at all is in fact a ridiculous argument that is not only wrong(as the seasons and the meteorological phenomena clearly prove) but even if it weren't wrong we would have to exhaust all the possibilities and assert this hypothesis anyway.

On Alchemy:

Alchemy is not merely the spark for chemistry but its factual progenitor and alchemy which is the study of chemistry for the transformation of objects has already been proven as today we do have the ability to chemically transform objects. Alchemy evolved into chemistry and dismissing the previous stage of evolution is what is misguided.

I find this conversation exhilarating and I am convinced it is helping my cause.

I have a militant atheist here that has already implicitly conceded to my arguments on the definition of God, the justification of my faith, the academic rigour of theology and even the core concepts of alchemy and astrology. The only thing the poor chap has going is insults, ad-homs and false accusations. It does not get any more exhilarating.

Be careful what you say next, I'll make this quote of yours my signature if you keep behaving like a petulant child.

Your threats and insults do not bother me at all, they merely further demonstrate your lack of argument. In this forum it is customary and a requisite for someone to ask for permission from the original author of a quote before they quote them in their signature. You are hereby given permission by myself to use this quote of my mine that you are threatening me with.

You mention astrology and then calendar, astrology being in fact one of the most perfect and accurate calendars you can ever have.

[RhetoricThug]

As I told RT in the beginning, there is no intellectual conversation to be had with you. This is merely demonstrating this fact.

I have a militant atheist here that has already implicitly conceded to my arguments on the definition of God, the justification of my faith, the academic rigour of theology and even the core concepts of alchemy and astrology. The only thing the poor chap has going is insults, ad-homs and false accusations. It does not get any more exhilarating.

Agreed.



http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dia ... _hires.pdf

If we consider the available intelligence provided by @XogGyux from page 21-present, we can infer he's not interested in civilized discussion. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean atheists are less civilized than any other member of society.

I stand by: Religion isn't science, and that's okay. Intelligent people can be theists and lead a rational lifestyle. Atheists can be intelligent and lead an irrational lifestyle. The true conflict occurs when someone becomes militant, hence the crusades, hence the gulags. The true conflict occurs when someone seeks a monopoly on knowledge or its source(s).

Lastly, we should evaluate the normative aim of belief before we cast judgment upon a group of people or ideas (as suggested on page 23 of this thread).

[Jim]

Atheists are more civilized and moral than the normal members of society. They can't just waive responsibility for their action by blaming it on "God's Will", or "Satan".

Myself, I am not a religious fanatic; but I am not without faith. I do believe faith does give you strength. True Story: 66 to 68, I'm in Vietnam. I knew a proclaimed atheist, and he was always spouting his views. Everyone more or less avoided him; simply because he just made people feel uncomfortable. I guess no one wanted to tempt fate. Anyway, the day comes, and he is hit in the foot. In my entire life, I never heard anyone else scream Oh God, so many times. He should have screamed Oh Shit; since he had to be sure shit existed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As far as my beliefs go, and I was educated in parochial schools & by Jesuits; I believe the very basic teachings of Christ & the Buddha are sound lessons to live with. 1. Do no harm in My Name & 2. Go and try to sin no more. That alone is a hard road to follow through life. I have little need for organized religions; since they all contain too much mortal input - human foibles. Any doctrines from any religions than can be interpreted to where they result in human misery is not my cup of tea; and religious scholars have trouble interpreting; so how can the common man be expected to interpret every passage? Simple common sense should carry a lot of weight.

[Sivad]

Myself, I am not a religious fanatic; but I am not without faith. I do believe faith does give you strength.

as far as my beliefs go, and I was educated in parochial schools & by Jesuits; I believe the very basic teachings of Christ & the Buddha are sound lessons to live with. 1. Do no harm in My Name & 2. Go and try to sin no more. That alone is a hard road to follow through life. I have little need for organized religions; since they all contain too much mortal input - human foibles. Any doctrines from any religions than can be interpreted to where they result in human misery is not my cup of tea; and religious scholars have trouble interpreting; so how can the common man be expected to interpret every passage? Simple common sense should carry a lot of weight.

That's pretty much where I come out on it as well, religion is a poor substitute for reason, conscience, and faith in the Good.

[Sivad]

my religion is simple: love good, hate evil, establish justice in the gate.

[SolarCross]

my religion is simple: love good, hate evil, establish justice in the gate.

Too simple, at the very least you need to include a definition or criteria for what constitutes "good" and "evil". Every religion pretty much has a "love good, hate evil" dichotomy, what sets them apart is in what exactly they define as good and evil. Eg: "good" for Islam = slaying infidels, "evil" = not slaying infidels.