quote:Originally posted by Zotto!: ... a society built on any "rules" whatsoever is fundamentally a religious society ...
Please show your work. Account for the existence of non-religious societies that nonetheless appear to have rules.
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The definition you are using to describe them as "non-religious" is flawed. They share a fundamental belief in something, or they would not be a community.
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Here is where I observe that belief != religion, particularly not where you are defining "belief" as "that which is necessary to share to have a community."
I belong, for example, to a club that plays board games. I am certainly part of that community. I would not hesitate to say that I hold many strong beliefs about board games, most of which are shared by members of my club. And yet I would look at you very strangely indeed if you asserted that I belonged to a religion that revolved around board games.
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quote:You'll notice that the LDS believe in continual revelation in which their previous understanding of reality is modified or thrown out altogether.
Tell me again why the FLDS are not considered members of the church? What authority exists to definitively say, among LDS adherents, that they are no longer adhering to the doctrines of the faith?
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Tom, I really don't care if you would look at me strangely when I assert that the fact that you would look at someone strangely for disagreeing with a scientifically-unsupported premise of yours is a tenet of your faith, since all you're doing is proving my point.
Authority only exists through allegiance. The LDS Church merely recognized the apostasy of the FLDS and named it for what it was. If you don't believe in the core tenets of the religion, in what sense are you still a member of that particular community? That's why it's a matter of faith.
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quote:I really don't care if you would look at me strangely when I assert that the fact that you would look at someone strangely for disagreeing with a scientifically-unsupported premise of yours is a tenet of your faith, since all you're doing is proving my point.
When I attempt to parse this sentence, I obtain this nugget: "it is a tenet of your faith that you should someone look at strangely for disagreeing with a scientifically-unsupported premise of yours; that you disagree with me on this only proves my point."
Interestingly, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, as what I'm "looking at you strangely" about is, rather, your assertion that shared beliefs constitute religions (and, specifically, the implication that my membership in a board-game club amounts to membership in a religion.)
quote:If you don't believe in the core tenets of the religion, in what sense are you still a member of that particular community?
Again, religions aren't communities, either. Perhaps you are defining religion far too broadly...? Remember, the FLDS assert that they have received divine instruction that the current leadership of the LDS church is invalid. This is certainly revelation that dramatically modifies the LDS understanding of reality -- but, because it violates the LDS' accepted epistemology, it is officially rejected. There is no epistemological model within the church that would accomodate this possibility; by the same token, the FLDS cannot demonstrate the truth of their assertion with any epistemological model available to skeptics. Neither, in other words, can be consider self-correcting models.
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I think you're defining religion far too narrowly, actually.
Obviously the FLDS believe they have received divine instruction about the invalidity of the current LDS leadership. Every community has some form of "divine revelation", though it's phrased in whatever vocabulary is available to the religion.
However, the people who make this claim will not have any followers unless those followers themselves make a faith-based decision to give their allegiance to that particular story.
The people themselves and their individual subjective faiths are the self-correcting model. No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.
The FLDS revelation goes against what some people believe, therefore those people reject the truth-claim of that splinter-group. The people who believed that the revelation on ordaining faithful black Saints into the duty of the priesthood was divinely-inspired stuck with the Church; those who did not accept it made a faith-based decision to give their allegiance to some other belief-system in which such a thing was considered blasphemy.
In the LDS belief, only the Prophet can receive revelations which impact the entire Church body, and then only when he is acting in his official role. A Prophet's private speculations on matters which have not been dealt with through revelation are not binding doctrine. It is a "house of order".
By rejecting that fundamental claim, the FLDS reject the root of the religion itself. They no longer choose to abide by the precepts of the faith. The Church ratified the splinter-group's own decision through their excommunication.
This is the strength of organized religion: that it can make definitive statements. If a member of the Church says that he was divinely inspired to do what the rest of the church considered to be evil, then the Church is right to disavow the connection, because the member is going against what the accepted teachings are.
Now, of course, this system, like every other human system, can be abused. But if, within the body of official teachings, there are clauses that state that anyone who leaves the faith has the right to be treated fairly, then any members who use the splinter group's lack of allegiance as a pretext for abuse are themselves going against the teachings of the Church, and are just as subject to reprimand or eventual excommunication.
Indeed, belief in a given religion is only meaningful in the context of the ability to freely choose to disbelieve the religion. Which is why America is Teh Awesome, because no single religion should have a monopoly over the others.
Religions are communities at a fundamental level. Your continual insistence that they are not is not in itself an argument against the idea.
quote:The people themselves and their individual subjective faiths are the self-correcting model....The FLDS revelation goes against what some people believe, therefore those people reject the truth-claim of that splinter-group.
And, of course, it's worth pointing out this is why it makes a lot more sense to actually base a community on testable hypotheses.
quote:This is the strength of organized religion: that it can make definitive statements.
This is, of course, also why Dawkins calls organized religion "evil." Because what that sentence really means is "organized religion can make definitive statements without having to consider demonstrable evidence."
quote:Religions are communities at a fundamental level.
No argument here; religions often constitute many different types of community. I object to your attempt to make this reflexive, however, by claiming that all communities (and beliefs) are religious.
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*shrug* I object to your attempt to claim that communities are not fundamentally religious without giving an argument for why they are not.
Why build a community on a testable hypothesis? What reason is there for building a community at all? Why is it "good", or "beneficial", or whatever vague synonym you use? Can you answer that without using an idiosyncratic, non-reproducible idea?
The point of organized religion is to bridge the subjective divide. The testable hypothesis is living your life according to the pattern laid out by the community. If it doesn't feel right, quit it. The demonstrable evidence is only demonstrable to an individual's subjective interpretation of the data, and science is no different in that regard. The good people I know in my faith community take that evidence into consideration when making decisions.
You can't live your life according to someone else's faith, whether you're a hardcore Christian fundamentalist or a devout atheist. You have to decide for yourself what to believe, and no amount of evidence in any direction is going to be sufficient to make the decision to give your conscious allegiance to a system of living for you. There is no luxurious detached stance in which we can just have our decisions made for us by whatever "science" or "faith" says is "the right thing to believe".
Peril of free will, that. Though of course I realize you consciously choose not to believe in free will, despite the internal contradiction.
There is a presumed objectivity to scientific inquiry that just does not exist. You can, for instance, lose the scare-quotes about what Dawkins believes, because it's obvious he really does subscribe to a religion in which every idea which is not confirmed through supplication to the Great Deus Scientia is blasphemously evil.
By putting the word evil in quotes, you seem to be implying that Dawkins must have some "scientific" rationale for regarding his own system of morality as "better", which he is simplifying for the benefit of us unsophisticated yokels who still accept that overly-simplistic "good" and "evil" stuff.
If you can demonstrate this unconfirmed morality with a falsifiable hypothesis which people can understand without interpretation on a purely objective level, I'll eat my proverbial hat.
Everything is dependent upon fallible interpretation. We build up consensus through storytelling, but so does every community. If a person has built up a network of stories in which calling the moon a lump of cheese does not feel right, make sense, fit with the pattern, then that person rejects such an idea, loses faith in it, refuses to regard it as having any validity.
I believe in evolution because it makes sense to me, it fits the pattern as I understand it today. It's enough to act on, for me, but if some scientist a hundred years from now finds out that there's some underlying aspect of natural selection that we don't even have the tools to look for right now, I'm fine with that. I believe there are a lot of things to both "science" and "religion" that have yet to be wondered about, let alone discovered.
The behavioral patterns we associate with religion are indistinguishable between those of "faith" and those of the "post-religious" society. But one side tends to be a little more honest about which genre their belief-story should be shelved under.
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You are equivocating on the meaning of 'religion'. Believing that it is good to make other people happy is not a religious belief, it is an ethical or moral belief. "I do X to achieve effect Y, and I want Y just because" is not religion, it is a side effect of not having infinite time to study the working of one's own brain. An infinite series of "Why"s is unanswerable, as any parent will tell you; to go from this to a triumphant statement of "Aha! You're not a real atheist!" is a bit silly. I suggest you stop.
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Zotto, you seem be basing your entire argument on a definition of religion that no one else agrees with. I don't even think a lot of religious people would agree with you.
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'Religion' does not, in ordinary English usage, mean what you are using it to mean. You are merely attempting to troll atheists by accusing us of being religious in some sufficiently vague sense - such hypocrisy! Imagine that, criticising theists for their unsupported beliefs in enormously powerful entities who interfere in human history and respond to muttered entreaties, while ourselves believing - oh, the barefaced lack of shame! - that having a community is quite nice, and that we'd prefer not to be murdered in our beds if it can be avoided!
This equivalence does not exist except in a vastly distorted use of language for purposes of trolling. Kindly give it up.
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By the way, the reason they would disagree with me is because what I'm saying is going against their religion. Of course there are religious people like King of Men who disagree with what I'm saying, since I'm saying that everyone is religious, and some religions are so circular they don't believe that they are religions.
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I'm a Hispanic raised in Hawaii. Ordinary english usage is not the only language with which to consider underlying patterns of behavior. Re-legere is to "reread", religare means to "bind". We bind individuals to communities. We hear stories, we read scriptures.
Kindly persist in proving my point that entrenched religious orthodoxies are terrified when someone doesn't subscribe to their dogmas.
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Fine; in the sense you are using the word, I'm religious. Happy now? Can we get on with discussing whether there is a powerful entity which created the universe, responds to prayer, and has laid down moral laws which we'd better follow, or else? We will, apparently, need an entirely new word for this concept, the old one having been preempted for your special purposes. Perhaps we could refer to it as 'theism', and discuss whether 'theists' or 'a-theists' have the better evidence for their proposals.
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quote:Ordinary english usage is not the only language with which to consider underlying patterns of behavior.
No, but it is the only language you are going to communicate effectively in, unless of course you want to try your hand at ordinary Norwegian usage. If you want a special use of a word, it is considered courteous to say "I am defining X for this purpose as Y", and also to stick to words which do not have pre-existing strong connotations.
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I think the fact that recorded civilization seems to have arisen out of Hierocentric temple-worshipping ritual complexes and every ancient people have a mythology of interrelated God-stories which contain very similar elements over vast times and distances (see the similarities between Hawaiian, MesoAmerican, and Egyptian sacred architecture) is at least interesting evidence in favor of a diffusion-based theory of religious-rites and ordinances over the traditional Joseph Campbellesque Jungian "collective unconsciousness" or "primeval archetypes" invoked to explain such commonalities.
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It is also considered courteous not to tell people to give up speaking just because you disagree with their ideas or accuse them of trolling, but I suppose it's against your religion to walk your talk.
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quote:Originally posted by Zotto!: The definition you are using to describe them as "non-religious" is flawed. They share a fundamental belief in something, or they would not be a community.
Why not? They could just happen to live in the same geographical region, as Tom pointed out they might happen to play Chess, as in a community of chess players, they might all happen to like wine, as in a community of wine drinkers.
Reading through the rest, consider a Venn diagram. You have a set A of religions and a set B of societies. It appears that you consider that "religions are communities" so A is purely a subset of B. However, your response to me seems to imply that you consider all communities religions, set B is equal to set A.
How do you distinguish between the two when interacting with people in real life?
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In the Venn diagram example, I'd say B is more a subset of various A's interacting with each other. For instance, I don't share the fanatical devotion to sports teams that most people in my geographic vicinity do, but I am part of the group of people who, say, believe in not breaking into houses and stealing things which are not mine. This implies that I am a believer in the doctrine that people can somehow "own" property. Etc etc.
I think the problem is that some people do not allow other religions any truth. So we have creationists who think all science which disagrees with their doctrine is evil, or scientists who think all conceptions of deity are equally flawed, etc.
But I can belong to a very specific set of believers of one religion (the Latter-Day Saints, in my case), while acknowledging that other people have much truth to their religion as well (I believe enough scientific stories to doubt that an incorporeal God is plausible, so I'm part of that unorganized religion as well).
But by building on the commonalities which our religions do share, we can get along without, say, forcing each other into concentration camps, as King of Men so famously suggested as a lovely destination for us open believers.
Who cares if kmboots and Tresopax disagree with me about the exact attributes of their God? What matters is that God seems to be telling them to help out the poor when they are able. In my belief, everyone's conception of God is probably at least a little off, so why not build on what we have in common?
The real question is how to deal with utterly incompatible religions. I disagree with any religion which condones terrorism, because my religion says that killing innocent people is wrong. The problem is when power-hungry people use the rhetoric of whatever belief-system they subscribe to as an excuse to satisfy their desires for dominance.
This is where the real ethical dilemmas arise, not some divide between religion and science, which, if we knew all there was to know about one or the other, would be pretty much the same thing, a shared story of reality.
The best I can come up with right now is a place like America, with a "public religion" that says it is wrong for any other religion to have monopoly over any other. This gets into a vast forest of ethical principles, of course, but the gist of it is what I quoted before:
No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned. In America, we have a system which, despite its many many insufficiencies and abuses, is at least founded on the idea of rational compromise.
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quote:Originally posted by Zotto!: ... In the Venn diagram example, I'd say B is more a subset of various A's interacting with each other.
Ok, B is more a subset. If B is a proper subset of A, please describe something that belongs to B but not A. For example, is it your contention that your described sports teams fans are community but not a religion?
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Naw. I think "community" and "religion" are fundamentally trying to describe the same underlying "thing" using different lenses.
A Muslim and a Jew and an LDS Missionary can all have incompatible beliefs about who the right Prophets are, so they join the religion that feels correct to them about that aspect of reality. With further information they might change their minds at a later date, but they commit to certain paths as a premise.
But they can also be fanatically (even, let me note, violently!) devoted to the same football team, and so they all have that religion in common. It's when we're deciding which rhetoric to use to try to exercise a little unrighteous dominion that we pick the one that will be the most powerful and internally convincing, to ourselves, if no one else.
It's a terrible mess, really. I don't like Aztec sacrifices any better than I like KoM's atheist concentration camp just because more people see the former as being "religious" than the later. But that's why it's important to have a free society in which people are free to enter and leave any religion they want to.
(Edited for teh speeling.)
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Wow, excellent addition to the conversation, Zotto!! (The first exclamation point here, of course, being part of your name and the second being part of my sentence. =)) I completely agree. Thanks so much for contributing all that to the thread. I just wanted to express my agreement for and support of everything you said. Bravo!
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Thanks much, Tatiana, that's a relief to hear.
(Tho I'm rather sorry I helped to derail the thread so spectacularly, since I was far more interested in your and Strider's discussion on gender than any of this stuff, heh.)
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quote:Everything is dependent upon fallible interpretation.
It seems to me, to make a long story short, that this is the core of your complaint -- but it's a premise I disagree with quite explicitly. Specifically, I disagree with the implication: that because all positions held and observations of reality are subject to fallible interpretation, no meaningful distinctions between positions or epistemologies can be made. But this is clearly untrue. Not all forms of knowledge are created equal; not all epistemologies are equally capable of producing "truth," and not all "truths" are as true as others.
I'm sympathetic to your view, and understand why you hold it so tenaciously; since you're an agnostic Mormon, I can't imagine how you would function without holding that view. But I've seen you have variations of this conversation many times over the years, and it occurs to me that you will never know where the other party is coming from until you grant the possibility that one person's truth is not necessarily as valid as someone else's. After all, even though all observations are subject to fallible interpretation, only certain sorts of observation led to, say, the germ theory of medicine; had we relied on religious epistemology for our cures, we might still be wondering why God wanted so many people to have smallpox.
There are good and bad ways to form opinions. Not all opinions, despite your assertions to the contrary, are formed as a consequence of (or appeal to) group membership.
(For what it's worth, I also have no idea why you'd bother trying to assert that, for example, allegiance of any kind is tantamount to "religion." I understand that you're using the words interchangeably, here, but I don't know what you hope to gain by doing so. Would you be interested in explaining why you are invested in refusing to acknowledge distinctions between the terms?)
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Threads going off the rails is part of the delight that is hatrack. Like Survivor famously once said, having the group is like having four-wheel drive, the whole point is to go off-road. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I'm an atheist, and one of the primary tenets of my "religion" is that it's pointless to argue with people who have already decided that they've won the discussion, and will twist their argument to incomprehensibility to reject any cognitive dissonance that might arise from having a meaningful conversation.
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Edit: well, this was responding to Tom's original, less detailed post and some of it is now irrelevant, but I'm too sleepy to go change it, alas.
Whereas I have no idea how you could conceivably think one could possibly function as an "agnostic Mormon" at all, dude. *laugh* But it's charming to know how incoherently I'm thought of.
You're reading me inaccurately, actually. I never said that there aren't beliefs that are "more correct" than others. I believe whole-heartedly that it is "more correct" to believe in God than to not believe in Him, just like I believe it's "more correct" to believe in evolution than some of the alternatives.
But we're not supposed to proselytize on this board, so I'm trying to be rigorous and not use my own religion as a "proof" of anything. I'm not quite succeeding, but the attempt is there, I totally get brownie points. *grin*
Obviously I'm criticizing your posts because I absolutely understand that "one person's truth is not necessarily as valid as someone else's. I merely refuse to grant you the scientifically unjustified position that my truth, in this conversation, is the invalid one.
This is all very circular; your post describes your beliefs far more accurately than mine, which makes sense because you're attempting to convert me to your religion without believing you believe in a religion in the first place! Don't worry, I don't begrudge you the attempt. *grin*
Heck, one of my foundational beliefs is that the Book of Mormon is, as Joseph Smith said it was, "the most correct book" so far as religion goes. But I'm not going to lie and say it's not a subjective choice to believe in what he said.
I think there are people who have read both the BoM and other competing scriptures and come away unconvinced by the BoM. That's just a matter of faith, and there are plenty of good people who don't share my beliefs.
The point is that all such choices to believe any authorities are just as subjective and dependent on faith, and so nothing is infallible, a term I'm not even sure has meaning. So when you invoke your "scientific" beliefs and say they disagree with my "scientific" beliefs, which are both different from a Creationist's "scientific" beliefs, it's useless to appeal to authority and say "Well, Science says my belief is more correct."
Obviously we disagree with what the evidence points to in the first place! So we have to go through the laborious and annoying process of trying to persuade each other to believe as we do by creating detailed stories which explain our point of view.
The more stories we're able to reconcile into a single pattern, the more we are able to account for different perspectives, the closer we'll get to "true reality", a concept and means of ordering our understanding of which I have faith but no "scientific proof" even exists at all. I'm in the middle of Hobbes right now, and like he says, I think our memories themselves are stories we imagine. Memento highlighted this aspect of life quite well, I thought. We reveal our character by choosing which faith we believe in.
It's hilarious, for instance, to watch Dawkins and Dennett heap scorn and pity on openly religious folk and then turn around and mourn Douglas Adams or suggest that they print up some collections of cool Carl Sagan quotes into a little "Bible" to help educate the masses.
Why, scientifically speaking, is "death" a "worse" state than life? How can you make any "scientific" statement or judgement about any question of morality at all? Why is a collection of scientific stories which we don't even know enough to know whether or not they are true somehow worth more than the physical records of real people who claim to have had dealings with Gods (the records which must have been written and believed by some people, because they helped to create more or less stable intergenerational cultures which still exist today and must have had some origin!)?
Of course some scientific stories are oftentimes more useful than some religious stories at performing certain tasks, like, say, electrical engineering. I don't want my mechanic believing that he can fix my internal combustion engine by drawing a pentagram on it. Some scientific stories are more useful than other scientific stories too, with each new model hopefully getting a little closer to the truth.
I'm glad that the people who can do calculus without a calculator exist, because when they team up with other folks who can weld large pieces of metal together, they can perform the useful miracle of creating airplanes with which I can visit my folks back west.
But I have seen too much evidence in my own life and the lives of others to dismiss my religion as the product of a frenzied mind. The stories you tell about your faith in a purposeless universe, in the absence of a deity of any kind, as far as I understand them, are incapable of reconciling experiences I have lived through, which are useless to detail because I know my own subjective experience and ordering of stories and networks of information is not the same subjective experience it would take in order to make sense of the countless stories you believe.
Everyone is different, you can't base the testimony of your life-story on what your friends believe, though you can be comforted when you come to a similar conclusion about a shared experience.
So yes, the line between allegiance and faith and organized religion is blurry at best, because every time we form a community, some form of communication is occurring, some form of transmission of a worldview is being shared to at least some degree, and if you agree with a particular worldview, it necessarily means you disagree with others, and therefore you must make a decision, based on absurdly incomplete information, about what the correct course of action to take is.
This is what I believe separates humanity from most other animal life: we have somehow shifted the survival of our species away from an emphasis on the individual and towards the formation of communities based on shared stories with which we manipulate social systems.
(Conveniently enough, I also believe that "in the beginning", was "the Word". *grin*)
No story can be told without editing information and ordering a fundamentally non-linear system into an approximately logical progression. No story can be told without a moral decision about what is or is not important. What matters is which stories you believe enough to act on.
Edit to add: Though I don't think we ever get a "full" understanding of anything in this life, I do believe that any true religion will have replicable results if we put it to the test. I believe in my religion because I've tested it, and it stood up to my tests, just as it has stood up to the testing of many other believers. We're required by our faith to test it ourselves.
The problem is that it's very difficult, despite the ingenious symbolic representation we primates have developed, to transmit the results of such tests to someone who has not had the same experiences.
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MightyCow: Ah, so your rejection of even attempting a meaningful conversation is a result of my cognitive dissonance. Interesting that your seeming inability to articulate an argument more substantive than "well, I've prejudged you to be wrong, therefore I will not engage in attempting a reconciliation with you" is characterized as a plus. Maybe you're intending the irony, but it's actually a quite pious attitude. Posts: 1595 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: ... (For what it's worth, I also have no idea why you'd bother trying to assert that, for example, allegiance of any kind is tantamount to "religion." I understand that you're using the words interchangeably, here, but I don't know what you hope to gain by doing so. Would you be interested in explaining why you are invested in refusing to acknowledge distinctions between the terms?)
Actually, reading through the OSC article he/she links several things about OSC's rants that I;ve noticed. By defining pretty much anything (global warming, university elitism, socialism, or even liking/disliking specific businesses) as religions, Card allows himself to use explicitly religious rhetoric to criticize pretty much anything.
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I think his point is actually that the seemingly-differentiated superficial styles of rhetoric employed by all of those various communities are, at root, a form of religious expression themselves, used to bind believers together to a shared understanding of reality.
quote:So when you invoke your "scientific" beliefs and say they disagree with my "scientific" beliefs, which are both different from a Creationist's "scientific" beliefs, it's useless to appeal to authority and say "Well, Science says my belief is more correct."
I submit that a huge chunk of the difficulty you're having with this conversation is due to your apparent inability to realize that the application of the scientific method is not in fact a mere appeal to authority, and that many people do have better reasons to trust that the scientific method produces more optimal outcomes than other epistemologies than simply "Science says so."
quote:It's hilarious, for instance, to watch Dawkins and Dennett heap scorn and pity on openly religious folk and then turn around and mourn Douglas Adams or suggest that they print up some collections of cool Carl Sagan quotes into a little "Bible" to help educate the masses.
Why, scientifically speaking, is "death" a "worse" state than life?
This, to me, is a perfect example of how you're just not getting it. "Scientifically speaking," someone like Dawkins mourns the loss of Douglas Adams because, from Dawkins' POV, Adams is no longer available to his reality; Adams brought value to Dawkins' experience, and Adams' perceived death has brought an end to the possibility that Adams will produce new works of value to him. It is not necessary to hold a "religious" belief to conclude that human life has value to oneself, any more than it is a "religious" belief that cookies are yummy.
quote:Why is a collection of scientific stories which we don't even know enough to know whether or not they are true somehow worth more than the physical records of real people who claim to have had dealings with Gods (the records which must have been written and believed by some people, because they helped to create more or less stable intergenerational cultures which still exist today and must have had some origin!)?
Is this a rhetorical question, or would you like me to answer it for you? It strikes me that the answer is rather critical to your understanding of my point, in fact, since my argument is at its core that this particular question HAS an answer and moreover has been conclusively answered for some time.
quote:I believe in my religion because I've tested it, and it stood up to my tests, just as it has stood up to the testing of many other believers.
As recently as late 2005, you were claiming to be an agnostic on PZ Myers' blog. I assume you have tested your religion more intensely since then?
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quote:Originally posted by Zotto!: ... all of those various communities are, at root, a form of religious expression themselves, used to bind believers together to a shared understanding of reality.
Yes, I believe that is indeed a restatement of the idea that by whitewashing the differences between religious and non-religious groupings, Card can simultaneously saddle non-religious groups with the worst rhetoric that religion has to offer (dogma, inquisition, persecution, etc.), while removing from his frame of reference the advantages that non-religious groupings can have.
(For something completely unrelated, I am also pondering the undefined word 'hierocentric' which at a quick glance appears to be absent in online dictionaries)
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I joined the LDS church this past September. 2005 was a looong lifetime ago.
I "submit" that you're the one having difficulties with this conversation, by the way. Your first sentence was, in fact, an unsubstantiated appeal to the authority of that community of people who "have better reasons" for believing in the scientific method's reliability in producing (conveniently undefined) "optimal" results. I'm supposed to have faith and take your word for it? What in the world is an "optimal" scientific outcome? This is the crux of the issue.
Heck, in what way is this dissimilar from a Creationist insisting that "Well, them folks at the Council of Nicea believed in an incorporeal God, and by golly that's good enough for me!"
What experiment did Dawkins do to falsify the hypothesis that Adams brought some sort of nebulous "value" to his life? Can he transfer this understanding to me? You keep asserting you can form values without some form of unscientific belief in "goodness" as opposed to "badness".
I have no doubt that Dawkins misses his friend. I miss Adams too! I'd rather he was still with us. When Dawkins goes, I'll be sad he's gone as well, since some of his insights into evolution are fascinating.
But I don't claim, as he does, that this subjective experience of grief is somehow "provable" to someone outside my head, outside my heart.
Nevertheless, I somehow manage to still believe and trust in the scientific method!
For what it's worth, I'd be happy to hear your answers any questions I ask you; that's why I ask them! You keep asserting that my comprehension of your arguments is flawed and then neglecting to actually tell me why. What other recourse do I have but to continue to believe what I believe, since no better alternative has been offered?
Edit: Wow, the grammar in that last paragraph is amusingly awful. I shall leave it standing for the amusement of all.
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Mucus: well, if you want to interpret him that cynically, ain't no one gonna stop you, heh.
I do apologize, however, for using that rather eccentric term earlier. It's a technical word used (and, if I'm not mistaken, coined) by Professor Hugh Nibley back in the 1930's to describe, essentially, the Temple and/or Megalithic -centered communities of the ancient world.
(He beat out guys like Mircea Eliade, so I'm inclined to give his terms a little preference, but that was careless of me to use it in a context where it'd most likely be unfamiliar to those I'm speaking to.)
Or, heck, you could peruse a sampling of his ridiculously enormous corpus of writings here: http://tinyurl.com/yem4pkj (I'd especially emphasize the chapters from 'The World and the Prophets', but I am merely a drooling fanboy. >_>
Some of his conclusions were a little hasty, and some of his work is now dated (heck, he was publishing almost a century ago!), but the gist is still pretty darn good.
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Zotto, the atheists here are not taking you seriously because the only "argument" you're offering is to redefine a word in such a way as to make it useless. Are there similarities between the catholic church and a football team and nation-state? Yes. There's also similarities between oranges/bananas and chicken/lamp chops. Just because they're both food doesn't mean that there aren't radical differences between them and doesn't mean we should get rid of the different words we use to refer to them.
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I don't think the distinction between the two words is useless, and I never said it was. In a sociology class, it makes sense to speak of "communities". In a theology class, it makes sense to speak of "religions".
At a restaurant, I can ask for a glass of water. In a lab, I can ask for a vial of H2O. Different contexts, different names. Same underlying referent.
Edit: Look, I'm only here because Tom claimed that Tatiana was incorrect to state that she believes in a system in which she could include the findings revealed by the scientific method without basing every single tenet of that faith on such findings.
His contention is simply incorrect, since he, and you, and I, and everyone obviously manage to get through life without having every aspect of reality "proved" by such a method. It is incorporated into our respective worldviews, but it is not the authority by which we undertake most of our actions. I just think it's silly and unscientific to pretend it is.
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Except that you still need a word to distinguish "a set of beliefs concerned with supernatural phenomena, morality and the nature of the universe" from "a group of people living together in a valley who've agreed on some rules so they can get along" and "a group of people who enjoy a particular pastime."
In a restaurant, you do not ask for wine when you mean grape juice because they are "sort of the same thing." There is a difference between a religion, a game, a society, and the application of the scientific method. There is also a difference between the supposed "faith" that when you jump up you will come back down versus the faith that there is an omnipotent God watching over you.
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Well, I think the idea of "supernatural phenomena" is a contradiction in terms, if that helps ease the confusion. How can anything exist "above" or "outside" of nature?
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And really, there is nothing that proves that gravity won't switch off tomorrow. We believe it doesn't because it hasn't yet, so far as we know. I'm fine with this, and I do indeed trust that when I jump I will fall back to earth, and basing scientific measurements off this understanding of our place in space-time has given us many benefits, which I can measure by using the moral precepts taught by my religion such as "life is sacred" and whatnot. But it's not scientifically "proven". And why pretend it is?
I'm fine with using different terms to describe different aspects of the same idea. You have offered nothing but an assertion to the contrary, without demonstrating any such thing.
Many games began as religious rituals. Many societies were founded on religious tenets. The scientific method takes many unsupported claims (like the fact that we have a hope of understanding reality through the teensy little network of stories collated from a few replications of a few experiments) as givens. It's not the end of the world.
... dude, I think I just morphed into Tresopax. *grin*
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quote:Originally posted by Zotto!: Mucus: well, if you want to interpret him that cynically, ain't no one gonna stop you, heh.
Well, I don't necessarily know if hes doing it on purpose. I've gone back and forth on that one
quote: ... coined) by Professor Hugh Nibley back in the 1930's to describe, essentially, the Temple and/or Megalithic -centered communities of the ancient world.
Looks like it. It doesn't seem to have gained much traction in non-Mormon circles either.
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