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Noah -> RE: The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken (9/18/2006 12:00:03 AM)
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Well BA, I just don't know how to enter into a conversation with a person who can even conceive of a dichotomy between poetry and truth.
So when you hear the poet say: "Flesh is grass" I suppose you whip out your Funk and Wagnalls and compare the definitions of the subject and object terms, find them disimilar; evaluate the logical operation of the copula "is", and confidently declare that the poet has made an error of fact. Is that about right?
Language works in more than one way, BA. Language as well as other forms of human expression bear truth in more than one way. It is tidy to disqualify all modes of truth-bearing except the one associated with, say, formal logic. Kind of like it was politically tidy, for a while, for a certain class of people to disqualify women and minorities as human beings.
It is tidy, until life--as it tends eventually to do--washes over you. But it is cowardly all the while to sit in your room with eyes closed and decide what fills the world, and then open your eyes refusing to see anything which fails to confirm your hypothesis.
You did a bang-up job of this when you attacked "my" argument for the existence of God. Because everyone who read this thread with his eyes open saw that I spilled considerable ink in the service of disqualifying every argument in favor of the existence of God. I not only think they are all bullshit but I think that the fact that they are all bullshit is important enough to go and post about.
With eyes closed you managed to sense the presence of this guy called Noah who was pointing out the gaping holes in your reasoning and you jumped to a conclusion which was in the end demonstrably false but even before that it was demonstrably unsupportable by the very evidence you were pointing to.
You seemed to adopt along the way the posture of the Warrior for Rationalism but in doing so you rather embarasssed yourself, picking up the pistol of reason by the wrong end, as it were, with the claim that "my" argument for God (Note: the one I never made) was flawed in terms of employing a false analogy.
People schooled in reasoning, or anyway the English language, know that an analogy can no more be true or false than a bowl of soup can be sung in the wrong key. It is simply nonsense to attack an analogy as "false." It is a trusim that "all things are comparable." There are terms in which to criticize analogies but truth/falsity is no such set of terms. Fo you to attack my analogy in those terms in the service of your attack on an argument which was never made is, well it's just s humdinger alright.
You aren't the only poster here who has used the word "myth" as though it were derogatory in a conversation about modes of bearing truth. Myth of course is an immensely powerful tool for the sharing of meanings, of truths in many cases.
To dichotomize myth and truth is just as dunder-headed as to dichotomize poetry and truth. Now please. I am not calling you a dunder-head. Just pointing out the dunder-headedness of some of the notions upon which your entire world view seems to articulate.
I suppose that it is understandable that you cannot appreciate the point I was making about the interesting history of certain ideas of divinity, since you have declared yourself incapable of appreciating the truth bourne by the myth of the several blind men who encountered the elephant from different angles.
For you, and apparently for certain others posting to this thread, myth and truth are apparently as categorically distinct as poetry and truth. Pointing out how small and and unsophisticated and possibly cowardly and in any case simply preposterous this is just feels like explaining to a grown man that water is wet. Where does one begin?
For these reasons I don't so far see you as someone with whom conversation is likely to be productive but I guess I can take a leap of faith and try to take a few things point by point.
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You seem to complain about the discontinuity of the provenance of these stories, and then about the very continuity of their provenance in the very next breath.
Really? When did Marduk, Enki, Enlil, and Aten become the same provence as Yahweh? Oh wait, they are all fictional, right! I get it now, thanks.
First let me say that I hope you were trying to make a joke with the word province and that I'm not just dealing with someone stupid.
Whether or not any of those named beings are fictional has no bearing on the point I was making about your post. You were disqualifying as true certain ideas on the ground that various people in various places had independently come up with them and used different terms to describe them. Regardless of whether those notions were or are true, the grounds you cite to disqualify them are balderdash.
Some guy in Germany decides that he has discovered a previously uncataloged sort of eßbar mushroom. He claims the right to name it very odd name "The Eßbar Mushroom".
Meanwhile, some Italian guy finds the same sort of mushroom, and claims discovery of a new specie of commestibile mushroom and awards it the similarly silly name of "The Commestibile Mushroom."
Each is a rabidly nationalistic sort and publishes a book claiming that this characteristically German (or in the other book, Italian) mushroom is just the jim-dandy-est mushroom ever, quite unlike any mushroom named or found anywhere else. Soon after, each man dies of a kind of progressive poisioning (and of course "commestibile and eßbar both mean what "edible" means in English--unless Babelfish botched the translation for me.)
There is plenty wrong with their claims, or course, but your argument, BA, wouldn't cite them for any of these plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face errors. Instead it would count the fact that claims such as these were made underthose very circumstances stands to weaken anyone's belief in the existence of that specie of mushroom.
In fact of course the myth of the goofy continental botanists, even if it were factually correct, would not disprove the existence of that specie of mushroom. Quite the contrary.
{Let me pause here to note that if you manage to take this as some sort of argument by analogy on my part for the existence of God then you are once again charging ahead eyes closed for it is meant as no such thing.}
This is just as plain as the fact that various people in various places having a term for what modern English commonly calls "God" lends no logical support to any claim that said entity fails to exist. It is just logical hogwash, BA.
When you go on, rather incoherently in my view, to point out that some of these peoples probably bequeathed their "God" notions to one another and that that--i.e the fact that the ideas weren't dreamed up separately after all--also stands to disqualify anyone's belief in the God idea, well in the first place you are arguing against yourself but in the second place you manage to make each of the opposing sides you're taking in this argument fail.
About which more later.
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Here's a hypothetical for you:
If two people read your post, internalize its message (a feat beyond my meager capabilities, I'll grant) and each paraphrases and passes on your message in his own, different native language, please tell us if this proves that
A. What you wrote was false?
or
B. That you do not exist?
And you call me incoherent?
I'm not sure if just one or actually both of these outcomes are guaranteed by your implicit theory.
You never met this criticism and it still stands.
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You note evidence that people in widely divergent times and places have documented that they were inspired in one way or another with compelling truths and ideas of great value. Furthermore--and to me quite fairly--you indicate that evidence suggests strongly that they passed these ideas down, re-contextualized them and re-shared them.
Which brings us to the point where your Fonzi jumps the shark, if you'll pardon an Americanism.
The above-stated evidence and reasoning you see as proof of the non-existence of Divinity, or disproof of the unity of Divinity?
My examples do not prove the non existence of a deity, but they do detract from the claim of some religions that their holy book is the ' true ' source. As the Mesopotamians and Egyptians had a plurality of gods, the whole One True God nonsense sort of washes down the drain. Few people today, with the exception of Chaingang ( heh heh ) believe the Babylonian gods to be anything other than mythology. But in the next breath they will insist that their god is NOT myth, despite their holy book being a hodge podge of older, pagan, polytheistic tales rolled into one poorly written book.
So the fact that mesopotamians and egyptians were polytheistic disproves all monotheistic beliefs? Wow.
Does the fact that the beliefs handed down from Newton to Einstein were emmended by Einstein prove that an object at rest doesn't really tend to stay at rest? Maybe my socks are swirling around in their dresser drawer as I sit here barefooted. Or does it rather disprove Relativity? I'm not sure which way your knife is intended to cut.
People just like you took Newton to have given us the final word on planetary motion. Generations of them. Fortunately most of us realize that our apprehension of any aspect of human experience, and our understanding of same, can improve over time. That is why universities still pay scientists and theologians, because contrary to some wild-eyed claims made in this thread religions don't tend to say "this is the last word on the subject" any more than science does. Experiences and ideas are shared and understanding progresses--with plenty of backward steps in both dances.
But anyway you have clarified for us that these particular claims were not intended to buttress your claim that any belief in Divinity is mere superstition. Please forgive me for thinking that you meant your various arguments to support your conclusion.
The thing is that whether someone's favorite book is a book of myth or a book of history or a book of science or of social satire says nothing whatever about the question of whether that book manages to pass along truth. Of course you will likely reject this since you have managed to navigate the world so far with the kindergartenish notion that myth and truth stand in some sort of opposition, which at best betrays a lack of understanding of the rich meanings of one or both of these words.
I think Machiavelli's The Prince embodies gallons and gallons of truth. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that scholars such as yourself could find any particular element of his presentation or his theories represented previously in other literature and or folklore. As is patently obvious, this would have no bearing whatever on the existence or non-existence of that which the book addresses. Yet you hold that the fact that a scriptural work has an historical pedigree should be weighed in against belief in the claims made in that work.
Astonishing.
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I don't believe I've ever met an adult so astoundingly naive and credulous as to accept a belief of that sort based on evidence and reasoning of that quality before. But I was born to have adventure so I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.
Ahhh, but I HAVE met people so obliviously delusional that they will use the most irrational, convoluted arguments to try and keep the belief in their invisible sky daddy alive. It seems that I have had the pleasure of meeting yet another one here.
And here we find ourselves at one of the points at which BrutalAntipathy can be seen tilting at windmills. I have worked doggedly in this thread to disqualify any irrational, convoluted, or any other sort of argument for the existence of God. I have said in clear declarative sentences that they are all bunk, without exception. You, plunging ahead with eyes closed choose to posit the existence of a theological apologist where all the evidence shows that none exists. This is shamefully careless at best and gives a clear impression of intellectual dishonesty.
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What was that word you used ... "Superstitious"? Your post is like a primer on how to believe shit wackier than any superstition I've ever heard of.
Yeah, gee. That history and archaeology is some wacky shit, man!
Here we see again either hopelessly careless reading or bald intellectual dishonesty. Scroll up and note where I accepted your historical and archaeological evidence with no qualms indicated (the part in green, if you're having trouble.) Yes, there it is. Then I proceeded to point out the worthlessness of your argumentation, yes.
So what do you choose to defend? Your shit-ass reasoning? No. You defend the credibility of evidence which I never attacked in the first place.
I can't tell if you have no idea how to engage in reasoned discourse or whether you're cowed and reaching for straws or whether you just don't value integrity much.
By the way I don't suspect that you feel cowed in the least, given your prodigious capability to overlook, ignore and squeeze by so much which stands between you and reasoned acceptance so much that you accept in such a blithe manner.
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Does Liebniz's first presentation of the calculus in his own hand prove that he plagiarized Newton? Does it alternatively or also prove somehow that Leibniz and Newton were both "on about" something that doesn't exist? I guess that according to you the one thing it can't be taken as evidence of is that a single source of inspiration can make itself felt in two people at different times in different places, or even in two different places at approximately the same time.
Hmmm, lets see. Calculus is a tool and an abstraction. Is your invisible sky daddy nothing more than an abstract tool? Otherwise this analogy is false.
As noted above, it is a piece of patent nonsense to say that an analogy is either false or true, as you should know.
The rhetorical "sky daddy" seems like the sort of gambit a person resorts to when he thinks he needs to bail out with emotional flailing the water which is gushing in through the gaps in his position. The "your" is completely anaccountable based on anything presented in this thread.
Your argument was that belief in a thing should be diminished in a case where history shows divergent claims to the thing's discovery. The analogy I offered was meant, quite plainly I think, to apply in that sense and no other.
But since you've chosen to focus on this let's take a further look here.
Why is it, BA, that when scientists all over the world look at the data and draw similar conclusions it is evidence that they are right (even though significant numbers of other scientists and non-scientists might disagree,) Whereas when, I don't know, let's say priests from all over the world (and all over history) look at the data and draw similar conclusions it is evidence that they are wrong?
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Someone was just talking about New Zealand. I'm pretty fond of the work of the Maori poet Hone Tuware. Let's think for a moment about an exhaustive attempt to to find internal contradiction in the body of his work on a literal level, or to find resonance--up to and including long strings of text and central ideas--between his work and that of Pablo Neruda, say, or that of the authors of "Beowulf" or the stories of Tuware's Maori elders in ages past, so as to "disprove" Tuware.
Poetry is poetry, not ' truth '. Or does the fact that there are people named Sam that do not like green eggs and ham ' prove ' that Dr. Seuss was divinely inspired? Is the Cat & the Hat a holy text?
This of course is the claim which I will gladly pay someone to carve on your tombstone but I'm rather afraid you'll beat me to it.
"Poetry is poetry, not ' truth '."
You just haven't a single solitary clue, do you? You don't even seem to have an inkling of the existence of that vast range of human experience, truth, and the beauty thereof which you have been trained not to see. And you cling so doggedly to this blindness trained into you by Enki-knows-who. Those who educated you really fucked you over but all the blame can't be assigned there. We grow up and encounter things for ourselves. When our indubitable experience clashes with the dogma we were handed as children it is our responsibility to transcend our training enough to see what is in front of out eyes.
Someone taught you that Poetry and truth stand in opposition and you still choose to believe him. You just don't get a pass on that one. I hope you manage sooner rather than later to shake these particular scales off of your eyes.
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Of course the first thing we'd note is what a myopic waste of time the proposed project is. Then what?
If Pablo, far across the Southern Ocean, expressed certain truths in idioms arising from Chilean culture and Hone expressed the same truths in idioms arising from his culture instead, can we conclude first that one is a plagiarist and secondly that these truths are not true?
Wow, what a great argument! Campbell wrote about culture and myth, and centuries before him, so did Plato. Two people seperated by culture and time made similar observations about society. Therefore God exists! Classic dude, just classic!
Another patently dishonest or pitiably careless gambit on your part, BA. My position against any argument in favor of the existence of God has been clear from the outset of my contribution to this thread. Have you really been so poorly educated that you must interpret any critique of a given argument against something as an argument in favor of that thing? I mean you just look like a complete nincompoop setting up a straw man argument, attributing it to someone whose position is well known to be opposed to that which you are attributing to him, and patting yourself on the back for winning a round. Pathetic.
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If the Brothers Grimm express in a story a truth once made manifest in a fable by Aesop or in a long-forgotten folk tale of the Caucasus or the Congo, does the truth drain out of that too?
Is this an admission that you believe in fairy tales? For some of us, this was already obvious.
I no more feel a need to admit that I believe in fairy tales than that I "believe in" propositional logic or the scientific method. Only an utter fool would deny that each in it's own way in its limited range of application can shed light on matters of some concern.
Oh but that's right. You don't believe that fairy tales, or poetry, or myth can bear truth.
Whoever sold you that, BA, sold you a particularly pernicious fairy tale.
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And the very possibility that people were inspired by a single Source to appreciate a given truth is itself proof to you that this source never existed?
While Hammurapi may have alluded to his laws being inspired by Shamash, he never came right out and said it. I would suspect that the inspiration was internal, but credit was given to an external source because they thought a law would carry more weight if divinely mandated. And since there is no evidence for any divinity, it is only rational to assume this is the case. Despite thousands of years of trying, there is not one scrap of evidence for any god or goddess, period.
I'll just blow past the absurdly circular reasoning in that bit.
Admit it now. You didn't even read the thread before jumping in with both feet in your mouth, did you?
"not one scrap of evidence"?
Do you believe, to any degree, in theories like, oh, say, Relativity, Special Relativity? If so, do you believe in these theories based on personally mastering the relevant symbology and transformation rules and performing the equations yourself? If you haven't done all the equations yourself, as well as attampted and found wanting the equations founding all competing theories then the simple case is that your belief in Relativity or Special Relativity is not based any more upon mathematics than it is upon the testimony of physicists.
Let me be very clear: the evidence which you have accepted as sufficient for your belief in any such theory you have not personally done the math for is "testimony".
If you believe that your thoughts are not the only thoughts in the universe, that there are thoughts in other people's heads too, then since there can be no objective confirmation of this claim it must be the case that you believe people when they indicate that they have thoughts. You accept as evidence "testimony".
Now some testimony can be seen as better than others, in evidentiary terms, and should be. But for you to admit testimony as conclusive evidence in matters as divergent as mathematics, physics, and epistemics and yet not admit testimony as evidence in the matter at hand is just silly as goose shit.
I hope you won't claim that you were previously unaware of any testimony in favor of the notion of the existence of Divinity.
"Despite thousands of years of trying, there is not one scrap of evidence for any god or goddess, period."
If you want to disqualify this evidence or that evidence, and you can make your case, I'm in your corner, pal. But to rule out of court as even being evidence at all a sort of thing which you personally rely upon as evidence every day of your life (the weather man's testimony in the absence of your own meteriorological analysis, say, and a hundred other mundane sorts of cases before we even get to your belief in scientific theories for which you have not personally done the research) well for you to rule this out as even being evidence at all-- but only in one sort of case which happens to be a case that you want to argue against-- that is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order and of the plainest sort.
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Your theory is right up there in it's level of credibility with WhiptheHip's pet "Many Worlds" theory that every time an observer observes anything an amazingly vast number of entire universes are spontaneously generated (not sure if this is ex nihilo or not, better re-read the FAQ) in which all possible results of that observation may play out.
Hmmm, since the infinite worlds hypothesis is as yet untestable, I think that it falls more in line with gods than with historical evidence of non Hebraic sources for the Bible. Although the physicists that promote the hypothesis have one thing going for them that theologians do not, a hypothetical reason to believe it. While hypothesis is a long way from evidence, it is orders of magnitude better than a warm fuzzy feeling.
I don't know if any serious person disclaims non-Hebraic sources for elements of the Bible. If there are such people they are nitwits who deserve our pity perhaps but not our trust. But the Bible is the scripture of a religion which posits multiple as well as ongoing revelation. I'm no scholar of the Bible but I have read in it as well as in the scriptural texts of numerous other religions. It says right in that book that truths found therein can be found elsewhere as well and that other important truths obtain which are not presented in that book, that it is not the only source of the Divine Wisdom it claims has been shared with humanity.
The multiplicity of sources you cite presents no theological stumbling block whatsoever to Christians or Jews, certainly none in particular to their belief in the existence of God as they conceive it.
This fact couldn't be more clear to anyone with a rudimentary exposure to those texts. How can you after all your reading still need to have it pointed out to you?
Some of the more extreme wackos in the various sects of those religions may hew to a notion that nobody else ever got the God story as right as their grand-pappys did but I have never heard even the greasiest televangelist claim that no divine truth of any sort whatever was ever shared with anyone outside of the publication of the Bible and the occurance of the "historical" events described there. For you to imply that the Judeo-Christian religions in some sort of general way hold this is beneath intellectual dishonesty it is just plain lying.
I mean please don't try to convince me that you have never been exposed to the Nativity story which goes to great lengths to demonstrate that even during the historical period of the old testament, that which Christians qualify as Divine Inspiration was given directly to "non-believers" in far away places.
In fact don't your colleagues who study these things now lean toward the belief that the Magi were priests of Zarathustra? Insofaras this is true then we see Christian belief upon scriptural authority in Divine Revelation to priests of another religion. Or do you have some wild-ass explanation for the story of the Magi, one which doesn't acknowledge that in the terms of the Bible they are to be understood as having received Divine Inspiration?
How the fuck did you spend all those years learning all that stuff you cite about ancient literature without noticing things like that? If I had to answer that question I'd probably think about the mounting evidence that your general approach is to decide first and then select and sort evidence accordingly.
Once again you use snake oil argumentation, BA. What the fuck, man? And all this to attack some Theistic argument I never made and never would. What the fuck is your deal?
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People believe untrue things all the time. They believe that men have one less rib than women, despite their being able to test that claim at virtually any time and find it false. They believe that racoons have no salivary glands, despite thousands of reports of rabid racoons frothing at the mouth. Why is it so hard to understand that people believe in the unfounded claim that invisible sky daddies exist? Give me the cold, hard truth rather than a warm, comforting lie.
Racoon spit, huh? What in the world are you talking about? Where do you live?
The cold hard truth is that your argumentation sucks dick. Okay? I'm not trying to prove what you are trying to disprove, or vice versa. I'm simply showing you and whatever stragglers here might still be interested that your argumentation sucks dick.
I'm not sure if your dishonesty in this thread has been motivated by a desire for comfort or if it had some other motivation. Nor do I much care. All the same the pot sure is calling the kettle black here.
This tripe implication that belief in logic or science or reason as final arbiters of truth is braver than religious faith is just one more instance of dishonesty, although in this case you might eventually convince me that it is yourself you are lying to in this regard, and not us.
If, like our friend Seeks and I you restrict your belief in the power of scientific method to a notion of a system which quite powerfully and consistently (but along the way quite fallibly) provides better and better predictive capabilities then that's fine. If over and above that you suggest for one moment that the scientific method reveals ontic truth then you have a story to tell about why you believe this. Because scientific method surely can't prove that scientific method can prove ontic truths.
[Paging Dr. Turtle.]
If your story comes down to "I have faith in science" then I'll recognize your courage at least. If you try to make any non-faith-based claims about the power of science to pin down once and for all ontic truths then you are just as self-deluded and cowardly as the worst of those in the religious camp.
I find it interesting that certain common-as-dirt sorts of opponents of religion will ridicule believers for suffering and even dying for their faith and in the next breath the detractors will claim that people only believe in religion so as to maximize their warm and fuzzy feelings. And then they'll typically pat themselves on the back for how rational their position is.
Some people take what I see as completely unwarranted comfort in logic or science. I don't imagine for an instant that this stands as evidence against the efficacy of logic and science when properly applied within their proper sphere of application. It would be idiotic of me to think any such thing.
Some people take what I see as completely unwarranted comfort in religion, too. Others take unwarranted comfort in World Cup Football or Nascar or Sophistical argumentation.
I don't therefore conclude that the subject matters of those endeavors fail to exist and neither would any other reasonable person. The subject matters of those endeavors indeed may or my not exist but the motivations of believers and non believers are nonsensical as evidence in deciding any such questions.
Maybe I've been unfair in my allegations of dishonesty on your part. If they are goundless I apologize. But if they are groundless then the conclusion to be drawn is that you are either quite dim or very careless or inept at argumentation to a degree that is tantamount to hopeless.
I don't bother to criticize Rule in this thread. I think that any mature reader who takes in the whole of his presentation in context is entitled to whatever conclusions that reader might draw. I don't see Rule masquerading as the voice of reason. His Tarot cards are on the table, as it were. But when you spout off with reasoning which ranges from silly to outright crap as if it is all patently matters of fact I'm inspired to speak out in favor of careful looking, careful reading, and carrying the conversation forward with a degree of integrity.
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