Evil Companies

[Pali]

Countless experiences by a whole variety of people from essentially every walk of life in nearly every country on the globe.

Anecdotes are not scientific evidence, no matter how many you have. My statement stands (you'll note that my statement specified "scientific" reasons - I'm well aware there are plenty of bad reasons around to believe in these things).

And considering how these stories tend to reflect personal biases and contradict each other all the time... I don't find them very impressive even unscientifically.

EDIT: To make things perhaps a little clearer... when I said that I don't speak in absolutes in this context, the context I was referring to was discussions of whether something exists or not in nature. I make absolute statements all the time... just not in that specific context. "There is no good reason to think X exists" is a very different statement from "X does not exist." Also, the context of the conversation will shift my phrasing... casually I'd be comfortable saying "souls don't exist," but in a deeper discussion of the topic I wouldn't use that terminology.

you got no proof and I got no proof.

You keep bringing this "proof" concept up, as if my inability to prove conclusively that souls don't exist is some kind of argument against my position. It isn't - it is not even applicable. One CANNOT prove that something does not exist that does not have internal contradictions in its definition... a 3-sided square can be said to not be capable of existing, for instance. Invisible unicorns, on the other hand, could always be possibly hiding outside our capacity to detect them, and so one could never prove that they do not exist.

Hell, logically, one cannot have absolute proof of anything beyond their own existence. The best you can hope for is a preponderance of evidence supporting whatever your claim is.

I love that you claim that something you can't support this second isn't worth consideration...

When the claim not only lacks support on its own, but flies in the face of well-supported understandings of how nature and human beings function, yes, the claim is not worthy of serious consideration. When the claim is not sufficiently defined to be even capable of investigating, yes, the claim is not worthy of serious consideration. Pray tell, what is a soul? What is an afterlife? What is a god? If these questions can't be answered, if definitions for the words cannot be agreed upon, then investigations into their possible existence are an exercise in futility and not worth bothering with.

And I'm not trying to sound or act smarter than anyone else... I type very much as I speak, and I'd be using the very same words and arguments if this were face to face rather than online.

[Mali]

Science contributes to our understanding of religion by contributing to our understanding of the world.

Religion, on the other hand, has inspired and motivated some of the worlds greatest scientists.

The argument that science and religion exist in different domains is irrelevant and furthermore untrue.

Anecdotes can and have contributed to our understanding of the world, and peoples experiences have and will continue to guide scientific investigation.

Generally, those that look to science to prove or disprove religion misunderstand religion.

Similarly, those that use religion to discredit science misunderstand science.

Now I leave you with food for thought:

Kierkegaard's torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self- expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man's torments for their own amusement.

...if we put this whole progression in terms of our discussion of the possibilities of heroism, it goes like this: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith. At the same time it is the meaning of the merger of psychology and religion in Kierkegaard's thought. The truly open person, the one who has shed his character armor, the vital lie of his cultural conditioning, is beyond the help of any mere "science," of any merely social standard of health. He is absolutely alone and trembling on the brink of oblivion—which is at the same time the brink of infinity. To give him the new support that he needs, the "courage to renounce dread without any dread . . . only faith is capable of," says Kierkegaard. Not that this is an easy out for man, or a cure-all for the human condition—Kierkegaard is never facile. He gives a strikingly beautiful idea:

The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would: by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness both to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties. Otherwise he would be crippled for action. We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction—in a real sense, man's natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it "partialization" and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action. I have used the term "fetishization," which is exactly the same idea: the "normal" man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren't built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the "immediate" men and the "Philistines." They "tranquilize themselves with the trivial"—and so they can lead normal lives.

Right away we can see the immensely fertile horizon that opens up in all of our thinking on mental health and "normal" behavior. In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality.What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others.

Becker, Ernest. (1973). The Denial of Death.

******************************************

Pali, I submit that you have more trouble with your lies than others. It is at once your greatest attribute and your greatest flaw.

For many of us religion fills a niche that science cannot. However, I do not impose my religion on my work as a scientist, except in regards to my beliefs on the ethical treatment of humans and animals in research.

[Pali]

Science contributes to our understanding of religion by contributing to our understanding of the world.

Religion, on the other hand, has inspired and motivated some of the worlds greatest scientists.

The argument that science and religion exist in different domains is irrelevant and furthermore untrue.

I also disagree with the basics of the NOMA arguments - science and religion both make claims about how reality functions. A key difference in this respect is that science bases its claims on physical evidence and reasoned logic, while religion bases its claims on authority, belief without evidence and revelation. However, religion goes much further than this - religions also make claims about how one should be living one's life, based on those claims that are based on authority, belief without evidence and revelation. If it didn't do this, I'd simply think it wrong - I wouldn't think it actually harmful.

Anecdotes can and have contributed to our understanding of the world, and peoples experiences have and will continue to guide scientific investigation.

I never said anecdotes don't have any value - I just said that they are not scientific evidence in favor of claims (unless, of course, one is examining people's experiences in the neuroscience/psychology/sociology/anthropology/etc. sense).

Generally, those that look to science to prove or disprove religion misunderstand religion.

Similarly, those that use religion to discredit science misunderstand science.

I agree with the latter entirely. The former I mostly agree with, except in the sense that where religions make empirical claims about the nature of reality those claims are very often open to scientific investigation. Ra's chariot does not drag the Sun across the sky, nor is Zeus throwing lightning bolts, nor were Earth and humanity created six thousand years ago.

I don't have a problem with religions making claims about the world. I just want them to be able to back those claims up somehow, and they fail miserably at doing so.

Pali, I submit that you have more trouble with your lies than others. It is at once your greatest attribute and your greatest flaw.

A few things about the quoted text you gave come to mind...

First, the idea of gods does not bother me, nor is it the idea itself that I have any problems with (beyond being pretty convinced that it's nonsense). It is the belief in gods that others possess that I have problems with, and there almost entirely because that belief very often comes with incredibly negative consequences both for the believer and for those around them, as well as the reasoning people use in support of that belief because I find the reasoning logically flawed and bad reasoning tends to result in bad decision-making. In short, if it weren't for the bad behavior of believers, religion wouldn't bother me much. On a side note, the Abrahamic God I do consider to be one of the most evil characters in all fiction that I'm familiar with, but the word "god" applies to a LOT of beings beyond that one, and I don't conflate the two (the author shows a pretty common monotheistic bias here in treating their god as the god of all religions).

Second, the terror and anxiety described as coming with the realization that we are all worm food is not something I have any conscious knowledge of ever having felt. The courage to renounce dread without being consumed by dread that Kierkegaard speaks of is not something that I would agree only faith, only a sense of connection to the "invisible mystery at the heart of creation", is capable of overcoming. Perhaps people are simply weaker than I give them credit for, but I've never felt the need to be connected to the world on some grand scale for my life to be something that I can consider to be worth living. I am capable of granting my own life sufficient value for me to continue it - at some point, my life will cease to be worth living, and I will end it. I'm quite comfortable with this.

EDIT: I'm also not entirely comfortable with the definition of faith as a sense of connection to an invisible mystery. That, to me, is a bunch of big words that sound good but don't actually describe anything beyond a fuzzy feeling inside, and it certainly doesn't seem to describe something that would serve as cause for the beliefs held with absolute certainty by so many religious people (and they are the ones who will say that they believe based on faith - I simply take them at their word). Nor would it account for the detailed beliefs of so many others... how do you get from "sense of connection to an invisible mystery" even as far as gods, much less a god that created everything, incarnated itself in human form, and cares about how we live our lives? EDIT 2: Basically, I think that this is an oversimplification in pretty language that the author is using to distract the reader (and very likely himself) from what the faith he is talking about actually is - a much more complex and subtle web of intuition, emotion and experiences, but sadly lacking in logic and objective evidence, that has led him to whatever his current beliefs are.

Where I do give the quoted text credit is in its analysis of how people "partialize" their thinking (I think "compartmentalize" to be a better description personally), in how they focus on the minutia of their daily lives so they aren't constantly bothered about grander issues. I fully agree with this assessment, and it's one that applies to me as well - I am certainly a being that lives, primarily, with my focus on my daily life. However, I don't think that "as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster—then he is in trouble" follows. First, I don't view "life and death" as eternal problems in any way - they are simply facts of life. Right now I'm alive, and eventually I'll be dead - where's the problem? This understanding does not trouble me. If the question is "how did this state of affairs come to be?", that's what science is for figuring out (the answer being "evolution"). Until we can get good answers from scientific inquiry, "I don't know" suffices. Second, to talk about the meaning of a rose or a star cluster is to make assumptions about the nature of roses or star clusters - namely, that they possess an intrinsic meaning capable of being pondered or evaluated. Humans are certainly capable of ascribing meaning to these things, but that's an entirely different debate, and not one that I think would cause the sort of existential frustrations that Kierkegaard is talking about. To talk about the cosmic meaning of a rose or star cluster is nonsense unless you can first establish that this meaning exists - and this has not been done.

I also have a problem with this: "In order to function normally, man has to achieve from the beginning a serious constriction of the world and of himself. We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality." Constriction and refusal are not the same thing, and the author is making a mistake in treating them as such. One can create fairly simple models of complex systems that are not flawed descriptions of those systems - they are simply not entirely accurate. There is a great difference between a description of something being wrong, and that description not including every detail. My mental model of the solar system does not include any transitory bodies such as comets, nor does it keep track of the location of the planets relative to each other at various times, and it simplifies the orbits into circles rather than ellipses... but this model is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. It is as accurate as I need it to be for all my practical uses of it, and that is sufficient. I am not refusing the reality of the solar system in any way by using this model, so long as I remain cognizant of the fact that my model is not entirely accurate and where its limitations are. Likewise, people use models of the world and human interactions that are a lot simpler than the world is... but that doesn't mean that those models can't be accurate enough to fulfill their purposes.

While I can't be certain that I'm understanding correctly what the author is referring to as "lies" without reading the greater text, I'd argue the opposite of your statement - I think I'm far more comfortable with my "lies" than most people, because I am consciously aware of them. The concept of a life without grand cosmic meaning to it does not bother me. That I will end up worm food does not bother me (well, actually I intend to be cremated, but... ). These are brute facts about reality, things that cannot be changed, and I realized a long time ago the futility of being frustrated with things that cannot be changed.

For many of us religion fills a niche that science cannot.

The only niche that science should be used to fill is that of how to go about investigating the world - it is the best tool humans have developed for doing so. It has no other application. If you've got other niches that need filling, yeah, look elsewhere... but why religion?

[Mali]

As much as we would like to believe science is an objective tool for investigating the world around us, it is often practiced with a goal in mind, used for the empowerment or to the detriment of a person or a population, and always biased by petty human thoughts, ideals, and standards.

[Pali]

As much as we would like to believe science is an objective tool for investigating the world around us' date=' it is often practiced with a goal in mind, used for the empowerment or to the detriment of a person or a population, and always biased by petty human thoughts, ideals, and standards.[/quote']

Not exactly - the scientific consensus, and certainly individual scientists or scientific organizations, can fall prey to these flaws, which is why it's very important that we understand that scientific results are not absolute in any way. However, "science" is a methodology, not the institutions that use this methodology, and to treat the two as the same is a mistake that many make.

And I can't help but point out that everything you said is far, far more applicable to religion. At least with science, in the end, we can point to the real world and figure out if things are working out the way we thought they would or not. Religion lacks this reality check. Even other sorts of ideologies (nationalism, communism, etc.) eventually run up against the wall if they aren't working out - religion is immune to this.

[Mali]

Even basic observations about the world around us are biased by the act of observation and the instruments or persons used to collect the data.

[Pali]

Uh... yeah... your point? It's not like anything humans do will ever be fully removed from the flaws of, well, humans. The best we can do is try to take them into account when we are making our judgments of things... again, something science is better equipped for than religion.

[The-Nameless]

*Pulls out a mossberg, and pumps two shells into this threads face*

*Waits to see if it dies*

[f0xx]

When you see that people's posts are longer than the longest essay you've ever written, then you know it's time to back off.

Seriously guys, you are arguing over the internet about religion and government. Pull yourselves together.

[Pali]

Discussing your opinions is a good way to re-evaluate them, to look for mistakes you may have made. Part of the reason my one post was so long was because I had to think seriously about what I thought were the flaws in the text, and writing/typing them out is a useful way to organize your thoughts on complex subjects. That wasn't so much me arguing as me thinking out loud.

[Elfrosto]

Arguing with Pali on some things just isn't a good idea.

He's really freakin smart. Like...upsettingly intelligent.

I once lost an argument to him about my own hair color....so..good luck.

[Imoutgoodbye]

*shrug*

Like I said, you can't sway everyone of their beliefs. Pali firmly believes in science as the ultimate measuring stick.

But the idea of "you can't prove it" and "you can't disprove it" is in fact the definition of pseudoscience, so when it comes to religion, both parties use this method. *points at the Sagan quote* Despite the claim being religion's claim, science is constantly used to "judge" the world. It's man's ruler (to be taken in either context). Any logic is a form of compartmentalization, just to what degree you are comfortable with. No, I'm not trying to define logic. It's too early in the morning and yes I love my excuses some days.

But above all, there is critical thinking. Which lends itself straight to science, but I use it to discern bias of man and judging the physical world. Anything involving the physical world and how we understand and manipulate it is science. It's man reaching for power and understanding. It has granted man the most power. Incredibly useful and fun.

Religion (or faith) is most often a "shut up and do what you're told" mentality. Partially why I've always rebelled against it and *nods at Pali* the behavior of the members of a particular belief or religion often repulse me, which is why I do not attend a physical church. However, what most religions do promote can be seen in the laws of America that haven't been twisted by money grubbing lawyers. Thou shalt not kill comes to mind rather quickly. Broken during times of war and I would kill to protect my family and by extension of protecting my family, protecting myself.

Where am I going with all this rambling? No where. I would, however, like to bury this thread at the moment and lay it to rest with the simple statement of: Society sucks! FL Rules!

[Mudder]

What does accepting the THEORY of evolution has to do with anything?

[Pali]

Pali firmly believes in science as the ultimate measuring stick.

I'd rephrase this to "Pali views science as the most reliable tool humans have for determining how reality functions."

[The-Nameless]

I still feeling using Human and Reliable in the same sentence is flawed.

[H&R]

Am I the only one who logs in just to see Pali argue?

[Imoutgoodbye]

Am I the only one who logs in just to see Pali argue?

Nope. I get better and better at writing my papers the more I argue with and against Pali.

Love ya, bro.

[Pali]

I still feeling using Human and Reliable in the same sentence is flawed.

If reliable is being used in an absolute sense then I wholeheartedly concur. If it's not, however, then I have to disagree.

Valek, Hitandrun... glad to be of service.

[Demiterracotta]

I'm right, you're all wrong!

And I have no point at all! Muahahahahahahah!

I like arguments, they give me warm belly, like a good scotch after being outside all day.

Ready! Fight! (Just don't pick Chun-Li, you'll get whooped)

Hope you're feeling better Valek!

[Pali]

First off - if you're going to bitch at me for resurrecting a politics/religion thread, don't bother. I simply will not care, and you will be wasting your time and forum space.

Now... apologies for the resurrection of a couple-week-old thread, but I'm drunk after a friend's birthday party, was reading old threads, and something caught my eye where my response to it isn't something I talk about often, and I didn't here either... and I feel like talking about it, so deal.

Yeah' date=' they might not be the single most enlightened things ever uttered... but we are all EXTREMELY low on that totem pole.[/quote']

One of the things that I have a somewhat illogical negative reaction to (I'm fairly confident I could argue my ethical positions logically from a mostly utilitarian perspective, but have little practice doing so)... anyhow, I don't like that in many religions there is concept that something is wrong with humans for simply being humans - not only wrong, but (particularly under the three big monotheisms) something that we are, on some level, morally responsible for despite it being something entirely out of our control. I think this is a terrible and wholly pessimistic way to view humanity - and this is from someone who expects World War 3 within his lifetime. I would be happy to expand on what I think to be the more rational reasons to believe this (if you want me to, say so, I will, and you can try to counter my reasoning if you wish), but I also find it far more emotionally satisfying to view people as, at a basic level, decent. We're not perfect, we're not saints, we're just people - but that isn't something to be ashamed of. It's not our fault that we are what we are (in a grand rather than individual sense). It's something we need to deal with, something we need to account for and take responsibility for - but we don't need to feel guilty about it.

Also, I would be happy to argue another point - you, KRins, as well as me and probably everyone else reading this, are a more moral person, in the sense that I view morality (behavior that reflects consideration of the well-being of others - moreso consideration for all others, not just others that you know personally or value through group identity), than probably every one of the authors involved in the creation of the Bible. Western industrialized societies now have in their legal codes and cultural norms a greater respect for the life and rights of individuals, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or tribal/national allegiance (same thing, different scale) than has ever existed in human history. I'd be willing to bet pretty much everything I own on the wager that you're a better person than anyone involved in the creation of the Bible - you, me, and probably 90+% of people we know.