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Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Saturday, January 22 2005 15:27 Profile #80
quote:
Originally written by KernelKnowledge12:

[quote=SkeleTony]
[qb]"God" cannot exist for the same reason that round squares cannot exist. SOmething cannot be both 'A' and 'Not A' at once.
Obviously if something is true, its complement cannot be true, but this proves absolutely nothing of the existence of any god or anything else for that matter. All this says is that God must either exist or not exist. Please clarify the reason for why you believe god does not exist, and on a further note, why you follow such a religious form of atheism.[/quote]*Sigh* The "atheism is a religion." or "YOUR atheism is a religion!" thing again...

Neither atheism NOR theism can be "a religion" themselves. There are theistic and atheistic religions as well as non-theistic religions and theists who do not have religions.

Having said that, I do not have any religion nor is my atheism religious unless you are so braodly defining the word "religion" as to make it useless/meaningless. I have no codified behaviors or ethics tied to or rooted in my atheism. I have no political leanings or convictions born of my atheism. My atheism is NOT a worldview, a mvement or even an organization of any sort. My atheism is akin to someone's position that square shaped circles do not exist.

Now, as for how I conclude that God is an impossible and imaginary thing: Simple logic. In order for the term "God" to have any relevance or meaning here, it must be distinguishable from natural things which already have names, even though they may well be worshipped by some as gods(the sun, Kim Jong Il, a volcano, the universe etc.). Breaking the term down to essentials, a god would be a sentient entity that is supernatural or transcendent.
Otherwise, if you are saying that, for example, "Money is a god." then I would agree that money exists, I just don't call it a "god".

In order for a thing to have an independent existence(re: does not only exist within our minds or as a function of some physically existing thing like a brain) in OUR reality(the only reality which matters here), it MUST, by definition be bound by linear time and physical laws such as gravity and energy conservation adn such. If the alleged being is NOT bound by such then it's alleged existence is indistinguishable from it's non-existence or imaginary status.

In other words, Sagan's "Garage Dragon" does not exist FOR US, even if it does exist because an invisible, intangible entity which does not physically affect anything in our universe = an imaginary thing.

As Sagan also pointed out in his introduction to Broca's Brain, we live in a universe with LIMITATIONS. Limitations are what make reality knowable/comprehensible. WIthout there being limitations on what exists or what is possible, we could not say whether we were walking the dog or slaying infants or anything else at any given moment. If we lived in an "anything is possible" universe we could not say that there were ANY planets(or that there were not 43 qunitrillion in my bedroom alone) or that gravity existed or anything else.

Science is about exploring the limitations of the universe to determine what is possible, what is likely and what is real. If something exists within our universe then it must be bound by the constraints of our universe or else our universe does not have such constraints at all.

THE Judeo-Christian and Islamic God is described as being "omniscient" and yet having a free will of it's own(able to ponder decisions) and even granting US this ability to make decisions(whence cometh "evil" according to many theologians).

This is a logical impossibility because decision-making cannot occur in the certainty of knowledge of the results of said decision. If God KNEW(as immutable fact) 10 million years ago that Adam would sin then he could NEVER have contemplated a decision to create humans. If he was able to change his mind about doing so then his "knowledge" of what Adam would do is NOT knowledge at all, but rather 'suspicion'.

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Saturday, January 22 2005 14:51 Profile #79
quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

Whew, this topic is spiraling out of control, as I expected it would eventually. A few thoughts:

quote:
Originally written by SkeleTony:
However Occam's razor would dictate he is using simple stage magic/cold-reading. Until the simpler/mundane explanation is ruled out, we do not give crerdence to the "extraordinary" explanation.
This is a hideously inaccurate understanding of Occam's Razor, and it is made no less inaccurate by its being common. Occam's Razor states, simply, that all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the truest.
Little advice for you: if you are going to call someone out and correct them in such a way, make sure you know what you are talking about yourself.

Occam's razor is the principle that we do not unnecesarily multiply entities for explanation. THe definition YOU provide above is the common, erroneous one. If it were the "simpler" explanation that would be best then you don't get much simpler than "God did it!" or "The tooth fairy gave me all that money!".

What is meant by Occam's razor(OR form here on out) is that, for example, if I get a flat tire and pull over to the side of the road and then find a rusty nail sticking out of the tire, I conclude that I must have run over a rusty nail and immediately disregard someone's explanation that a malicious gremlin sabotaged my driving experience by using a magical nail gun to pop my tire.
The reason why the "gremlin explanation" does not pass the test of OR is because it unnecessarily multiplies entities which would themselves require extensive explanation(what is a gremlin? WHere did it come from? How do we know it will do such things and has? What is the mechanism behind it's "sorcery"?) in order to explain, mechanistically, what happened.

quote:
It is a rule of thumb, not a law, and it applies to simplicity of explanation, not whether something is mundane or extraordinary.
Wrong. It is a principle of logic and rationality(not a "law" OR a "rule of thumb") and does indeed have everything to do with the mundane vs. the extraordinary. If I CANNOT explain some phenomena(not just "currently lacking information to do so" but rather that such an explanation is impossible or at least incredibly unlikely) then, and ONLY THEN do I look to the extraordinary because "mundane" explanations do not unnecessarily multiply entities while extraordinary ones DO).

[ Saturday, January 22, 2005 14:55: Message edited by: SkeleTony ]

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Saturday, January 22 2005 14:32 Profile #78
quote:
Originally written by All-American Alorael:

Another little point is that change and evolution are not the same.
But they ARE! EXACTLY the same thing! Evolution does not mean "progress". It means CHANGE. Most of the mutations and such that appear in individual members of a species are either disadvantageous or at least not advantageous. A few select quirks will prove to be advantageous in that environment adn will be more likely to be passed on.

In short:

Species A lives in watery environs and developes webbed hands/feet which give it an advantage over members without said webbing.

Species B's natural woodland camoflauge causes it to stick out like a sore thumb now that the envirnmment it lives in has been deforested. It is quickly driven to extinction by predators.

BOTH are examples of evolution in action.

quote:
Religion and culture, for example, are memes that change quickly and erratically, but not necessarily for the better. There is hardly any pressure towards cultural "fitness," and one would be hard pressed to define an evolutionarily fit meme.
Oh there most certainly IS selection pressure on religions. The reason why Christianity is not being led by Charlemagne's descendents on bloody sword-point conversions today is because the environment changed, making such 'traits' a disadvantage. There is not a religion you could name which did not either change or die due to selection pressures.

quote:
Language, incidentally, does the same. There's no real reason why the way we speak now is superior to the way we spoke hundreds or thousands of years ago. Things just change.
You are correct that there is no such thing as "superior" in evolution. Only "better fit" for whatever environment the thing exists in. English has evolved drastically in the last hundred years or so and, like ancestral species has branched into several new "species"/variations. The english spoken by a Mississipi mountain man is quite different from the 'King's english' and the english spoken by urban youths in South Central L.A. is different from both of those.

quote:
Polytheism went out of style in the western world, but millions and millions of Hindus would disagree if you asserted that monotheism is more fit.
Please understand that "better fit" does not = "Better quality". It is a simple fact that the progress of technology & scientific discovery puts selection pressure on religion. We become increasingly reliant on 'convenience' and it is much more convenient & user friendly to have one almighty deity who can allegedly do anything and more than someone else's whole pantheon. It is easier to teach/indoctrinate one about what "God" wants/commands then it is to do so for scores of conflicting personalities who allegedly control our lives.

quote:
[qb In fact, a great deal of conversion came by way of adaptation of previous monotheistic religion and militant mass conversions by the sword. Religions do not, for the most part, affect how well they spread.[/qb]
Agreed. Changing environments(re: society becoming less barbaric and more tolerant in general as exposure to others becomes the norm) are the thing.

quote:
Other things do that. A particularly fit religion might be one that mandates the forcible conversion of all infidels, but that's arguable.
Not today though, except perhaps in some isolated instances(tribal governments and such in remote areas of the world). BGut yes, that would be correct. In an envirnment where such totalitarian & despotic measures flourish, a religion which peacefully encourages otehrs to use their own free will to decide will be at a disadvantage against the "sword-point conversion religion".

For evidence of this, look no further than American enslavery of blacks in the south 150 years ago. Blacks were not introduced to Christianity through kindness, but rather through torment and violence. Any reprieve a black person got from his agony came with the caveat that it was God's merciful and gracious nature that allowed this, even though they(the black slaves) did not deserve it. It is quite a common phenomenom that slaves will adopt the religion of their masters/oppressors adn keep it even afgter being freed which is why so many blacks today are fundementalist christrians.

The Bible was also used to justify the acts of violence and torment as well but only to those who held the increasing sentiment of abolotionism, not to the slaves themselves for the most part.

quote:

—Alorael, who would also argue that trying to say that gods are or are not worthy of worship based on human standards is starting from a false premise. Gods aren't human. ... Can you claim to know better than God, assuming He exists?
We humans, no matter WHAT our attitudes towards religion are, make determinations about what is moral, immoral and amoral based upon our own subjective experiences. We cannot think with God's mind. We must use our own faculties and experience to determine if an action is 'right' or 'wrong'. THat we often argue/rationalize that God agrees/commands/disagrees is beside the point.

To that end, we are hard pressed to find someone who runs around demanding praise or worship or otherwise making it clear that he desires such treatment as being worth of such treatment. Humility and treating others as equals is a pretty universal condition for someone being worthy of idolation/worship and such persons would not want such(and would probably be dismayed by such behavior).

[ Saturday, January 22, 2005 14:36: Message edited by: SkeleTony ]

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Friday, January 21 2005 10:30 Profile #58
quote:
Originally written by Macrsp:

I almost find myself offended by the blatant assertions.

quote:
There is no such thing as "evil" except as a subjective assessment of an event or behavior
Please, the best that anybody can do is say that they don't know if there is real good and real evil. You can know something exists, but you can not know that it doesn't exist.
First of all you are employing a second usage of teh word "existence" which differs from the one by which someone will assert(for example) that "God exists" or "Trees exist". There are two types of "existence". Dependent adn independent existence. Things which have a dependent existence only exist as concepts or ideas or activities. Concepts in particular, only exist because sentient, brained entities exist just as "walking" only exists as something that legged things can do.

The idea of "evil" only exists because we evolved with these abstract-thinking brains. "Evil" has a dependent existence. My brain has an independnet existence(i.e. my brain does not only exist as an idea in someone else's head).

Secondly, we most certainly CAN say that some things do NOT exist adn are quite impossible. It was this realization that drove me from weak atheism(re: lacking a god-belief) to strong atheism(re: Supernatural Gods cannot exist). I can say this because of a little thing called the law of non-contradiction. "God" cannot exist for the same reason that round squares cannot exist. SOmething cannot be both 'A' and 'Not A' at once.

I KNOW that there are no street legal automobiles made entirely of gelatin anywhere on earth even though I have not examined every single automobile on earth to verify this.

I do not apply these same arguments for or against "evil" because "evil" is merely a concept, not an independently existing thing. You cannot point to an "evil" and say "Duck! Evil is headed right for you!". You can only point out an entity who is behaving in a way you deem "evil".

quote:
[b] To say that it just evolved is stating that there are no other possibilities.
If there were other possibilities then they are so remote that they should be ignored. For example, it is possible that John Edward is actually using psychic powers to speak with the dead. However Occam's razor would dictate he is using simple stage magic/cold-reading. Until the simpler/mundane explanation is ruled out, we do not give crerdence to the "extraordinary" explanation.


quote:
[qb]
quote:
The downside is that our brains are wired against "loose ends". If we don't have an answer for something(even if the question itself is a fallacious one) we will make one up.
Very true, but this can apply to what you are saying as well. Evolution is "made up". Every theory is "made up". Without the ability to "make up" answers humans would not be able to solve problems, come up with theories, or anything of the type. I hardly call this a downside.
You misunderstand. Theories are not "made up" in the way you imply. A hypothesis would be close(r), but not a theory. A theory in science is simply the explanation that best describes what is occuring, mechanistically for a given phenomenom. THey are subject to revision with teh influx of new information, yes but they are in no way comparable to "spiritual" explanations which have no basis in experiment, testing or repeated concurent observation. Superstition has no regard for rules of inference.

quote:
[qb]To complement this ability sentients( or at least humans) have the ability to sort out the good theories from the bad theories. If a sentient didn't know what caused thunder he/she/it would take data from its own experience and "make up" a reason, based on what it had experienced and what it knew caused a sound such as that. Either that or it would believe in the reasons that were told to it by those that should know.
Agreed.

quote:
However if new experience informed it otherwise, the sentient would revise his theory, or possibly even make an entirely new one up.[/b]
The only contention I have is that you seem to be employing the common erroneous definition of "theory". The one that non-scientisits often invoke to mean a "wild guess" or a "belief" or "a hunch". A theory in science is an explanation of a fact.

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Friday, January 21 2005 10:03 Profile #57
quote:
Originally written by Of Valinor and Eldamar:

[quote=SkeleTony]
[QBAH but we are talking about GOD(s) here! You may think it is fun to go worshipping your neighbor even though he has asked that you not do so(for whatever reason) but to do this to God...? If you("you" generally, not specifically) actually believed in him, you wouldn't.
Actually, we were talking about "sentient things". I'm avowedly agnostic, and from the premise that it is sentience that matters, I did not distinguish between human beings and deities. Then again, you're right about Gods. Mainly because a God, being much more powerful, can wreak a whole lot more havoc, and, being immortal, usually lacks that dash of humility that might put all that worshipping into perspective.

Plainly, it'll be much harder to find a God who doesn't want to be worshipped than a human. [/qb][/quote]My point is simply that worshipping things as gods is a bad idea because in order for the entity to be deserving of worship, he should not WANT to be worshipped. Such a being would find other sentients behaving this way to be distasteful(at the very least).

I am a strong agnostic(Huxlian) as well as a strong atheist(was a weak atheist and strong agnostic up until a few weeks ago) when it comes to supernatural gods(i.e. not the Sun or Moon or a divine emporer or anything else bound by the laws of physics).

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Friday, January 21 2005 04:56 Profile #52
quote:
Originally written by Of Valinor and Eldamar:

Worship of worthy people who do not want it is not a unilaterally bad idea (as long as it does not corrupt them). People worthy of worship usually have a lot of trouble in their lives and could probably go with a token of appreciation. :P
AH but we are talking about GOD(s) here! You may think it is fun to go worshipping your neighbor even though he has asked that you not do so(for whatever reason) but to do this to God...? If you("you" generally, not specifically) actually believed in him, you wouldn't.

quote:


I see "evolution" used with reference to culture. Note that originally it referred to biological and physiological development of species, not mental and cultural development of civilizations. The latter happens a lot faster than the former.
Nah. Even chain letters evolve. THe only stuff that doesn't evolve is stuff that is perfectly suited to it's niche/environment adn it's environment is not changing.

Sure if you are discussing physical anthropology or biology then you will be discussing biological evolution(natural selection, punctuated equilibrium etc.) but culture evolves by the same(pretty much exact) processes. The reason why CHristianity is one of the two or three major "super powers" of religion is because the cultural environment changed so that polytheism adn whatnot were less able to survive and thrive.

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Friday, January 21 2005 04:47 Profile #51
Another note about the whole morality/good/evil thing. As some have already said, there is no such thing as "evil" except as a subjective assessment of an event or behavior. So what we are left with is the concept of morals or ethics. ANimals, going as far back as the dinosaurs even display the same sorts of morals we do. Morals are part of being a social animal. The only reason humans are even around today is because we learned to cooperate against predators and the environment. CHimps, wolves, dinosaurs, dolphins...all of these creatures have(or HAD in the case of the dinos) moral codes they enforce(d). Anthropologists and paleontologists have discovered fossils of predatory dino's which had suffered broken legs but did not die until long after the injury had healed. THis indicates that the beast was part of a social group who watched over the injured creature while it recuperated, rather than leaving it to die.

We humans are mostly differentiated by the fact that we have brains which allow for some pretty powerful imagining and rationalizing. The downside is that our brains are wired against "loose ends". If we don't have an answer for something(even if the question itself is a fallacious one) we will make one up. We feel that every "why" question MUST have an answer(which is not true).

That is how we end up with thousands of gods, spirits, boogeymen, urban legends etc.

Superstition once kept us alive by keeping us from wandering into tar pits at night(re: "Beware the evil spirits of the darkness!"). Problem is that nowadays we have flashlights and guns and medicine. We don't need the spirits adn we can plainly see they are not there. But evolution is a (mostly)gradual process adn it will be some time before we see a world relatively free of religion and such.

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00
Root of all evil in General
SkeleTony
Shock Trooper
Member # 156
 written Friday, January 21 2005 04:26 Profile #49
quote:
Originally written by The One Lighter:

quote:
Religion is the root of all evil. Without it, the world would be very peaceful.
Be that as it may, religion is impossible to eradicate. The human nature demands that man worship something.

Edit: And personally, I disagree.
Actually, this is not true(that man's nature demands he worship...). While religion itself is an evolutionary trait that once served as an advantageous survival adaption, like many/most such adaptions, it is becoming a DISADVANTAGE.
Too much to get into in this post but there are millions of atheists who do not worship anything. This is actually becoming a common use definition for atheism in many circles. Many people have worshipped the sun as a god. I do not deny or doubt the sun's existence but I do not willingly worship it(or anything else) as a deity.

Worship is a bad idea all around. No sentient thing deserving of worship would want it and to worship an unworthy thing/entity demans US.

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"I am in a very peculiar business. I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James Randi
Posts: 219 | Registered: Saturday, October 13 2001 07:00

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