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Aswad -> RE: Faith to the faithless, a perspective (2/22/2008 9:50:12 PM)
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ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
My point's that I want people not to randomly think things.
Mine is that they do just that, whether religious or secular.
It's part of being human. James Randi is eminently aware of this, and uses it consciously to sway the unthinking masses from one unconsidered position to another unconsidered position. I have no doubt that his own position is well considered, but he clearly realizes that it's easier to sway people than to make them think for themselves. I would posit that organized religion would never have made it up to modern times at all if it weren't for this fact. By all means do try to cause people to think. I do it all the times. Sometimes with significant success. Other times with no success at all. Sometimes I just say "aww, fuck it" and sway people instead, but I realize that is the inferior option by my own standards.
Sweeping dust under the rug can make the surface appear prettier, but your asthma will still act up.
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I'm sure you don't want people believing in some things.
You are wrong. There are things I don't want people to do, but I couldn't really care much less about what they believe. If I were to go on a campaign to change all the beliefs I disagree with, I would be burnt at the friggin' stake. And it wouldn't just be the church crowd that would be throwing wood on the pyre. Ideally, I'd like more tolerance in the world. For people to leave each other alone, rather than stick their nose in other people's business and try to decide how they should live their lives or how they should think. That is an ideal that neither religious groups, nor secular groups, are particularly inclined to support. So I go on about my life, and let them have theirs, doing what I can along the way to encourage tolerance in those I meet.
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What if the police were convinced you did some sort of crime, and one of them was so sure he adequately framed the evidence?
Wouldn't be the first time. I am fortunate enough to be intimately familiar with the law. Comes back to what I said: I don't want him to perform the act of framing the evidence, but I couldn't care less what he thinks. If he does his job as he is supposed to, that'll do just fine. And any justice system will make mistakes at times, that's a fact of life. The alternative is to set up a new Stasi, which happens to open a lot of doors that are best left closed in any current society.
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Or what if some guy thought it was productive to steal your things? Maybe it's not, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt you if he tries!
Usually, it hurts him. Which is just the way it goes. It's his attempt to steal that bugs me, not whether he thinks it worthwhile. For all I care, he can fantasize about raping me six ways from monday before impaling me on the flag pole outside city hall. Lord knows I've got my own shit to keep straight. Again, it comes down to actions, not mindcrime.
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By the same token, I want the future engineers to know more about kinematics than theology. I want them performing more advanced stress tests than praying to God. I want doctors to work off empiracle test data, not hoping for magic to make cures work.
In short, you want them to do their job. I have no problem with that.
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I want farmers fertilizers and pesticides (as appropriate), not doing a dance to Wonka Wikkers, the (newly created) God of the Harvest (hell, there are so many of those, even that arbitrarily chosen name may've been used at some point in history :P).
Quite so. Not that it hurts for them to say "I hope this harvest will be good," or even some religious equivalent.
My own faith emphasizes the point that you are the one living your life; I agree that deferring responsibility to a deity is harmful.
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PS- I hope this clarifies, although if the 9/11 outlawing reference does connect to this somehow, I'm still entire willing to hear it out.
It connects in that people have pursued the illusion of safety aggressively since then, at the expense of real safety. Attacking the symptom of religious zealotry by acting against religion as a concept, rather than using it as a handy marker to keep tabs on who the dangerous people are and realizing that the symptom is not the disease, seems to be another instance of the same strategy. As usual, religion, like most human endeavours, comes down to people. I'm a big fan of addressing root causes, rather than treating symptoms. Instead of making a parking lot of the middle east, giving them the Internet with unlimited access to porn and all sorts of weird ideas will have a much more productive outcome in the long run, because it inspires thought and exposure to different views, which causes change to happen from within.
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My friend, if you say all dogs are "black", then all dogs are "black", but not necessarily black. It's important to understand the variety of words and differentiate between even very similar homonyms. In the case just mentioned, one can say that all dogs are "black" by definition. In the same respect, I define things which interact with our universe as "material" by definition (it's physically apt over what I see to be a vulgar colloquial term).
The question was one of whether you exist at all. A pretty solid scientist (and secular humanist of an atheist persuasion, I might add) that I know actually corrected me on that point when I noted that science can prove certain things. He pointed out that all the proof that we even exist is circular or axiomatic. Should you care to prove otherwise, that would be most interesting. He's both a lot more intelligent than I am (one or two orders of magnitude would be a conservative guess) and a lot more well versed in epistemology and scientific method, so it may not be surprising that I could not find a flaw in his argumentation.
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There's a difference between circular logic and definitions. How can something not exist with regard to itself? Do the things in your dream not exist relative to eachother? If we are deluded- if we're simulations on a computer- would you still not say that we exist with regard to eachother, particularly ourselves?
I would say so. I cannot prove it, however, which makes it a belief of mine.
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I'm finding that scientists and engineers who are short in Math can be wonderful as workers, but not as creators.
Such has been my experience, at well. Perhaps it has something to do with giving creators a language to express themselves in.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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