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Author Topic: Judaism and "faith"
Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
Belligerence? Interesting. The persistence is on both sides. Judaism is a faith based religion; there are leaps of faith. Particular to Armoth, with whom this discussion has already been had and essentially wrapped up, there's a leap of faith where it must somehow be impossible that the mass revelation is not what it is claimed to be by Judaism. To want to point out that a leap of faith is a leap of faith in response to an already existent assertion otherwise is hardly inherently belligerent.

Since Judaism is not a faith-based religion, and there aren't any leaps of faith, your continuing to claim otherwise is most certainly belligerent.
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TomDavidson
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Is there a reason this is a thread?
I mean, the Last Post Thread already exists, and it offers more variety than "is so" and "is not."

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Lisa
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The reason this is a thread is that Armoth and Parkour and Samprimary are engaged in an attempt to destroy the Ask the Rebbetzin thread. I'm trying to get them to take it elsewhere. Last time I tried, Armoth insisted on keeping the contentious derailment in place and the thread got locked. I'm hoping that he's learned a lesson from that.
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TomDavidson
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Ah. Makes sense. Best of luck.
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Samprimary
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The last thread was not locked because of Armoth, but it's interesting that you have the mental mechanisms in place to tell yourself that he bears the responsibility for it over your own actions.

Also, I'm not trying to 'destroy' the thread. And "Is not" is a great argumentative technique for 12 year olds, but I'm pretty sure you can do better. TIA!

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MrSquicky
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Samp,
I believe that a lot of what you said in that thread is correct. Despite that, it is obvious to me that your participation was inappropriate, though not in terms of the TOS or anything official. It is okay and I would argue important for the forum for there to be threads where people can discuss topics like religion, even if you strongly disagree with them.

You and the rest of the Hatrack religion hating crowd seems to think that it is important to attack and often belittle (and in many cases I've seen I think that this does violate the TOS) people on any thread where religion is discussed, no matter the content. I don't believe that this is good for the forum. It's disrespectful. It often violates the TOS. It is, as far as I can see, pretty much pointless. And it's getting very boring.

I believe that the forum would be more respectful, vibrant, and interesting place if the religion haters could take it down a couple of notches. I'm not saying you can't ever talk about how every religious person is stupid and wrong, but maybe consider the situational appropriateness of this. Not every thread that touches on religion needs to boils down to this. If people are having a nice, interesting time discussing aspects of a topic that you think is fundamentally wrong, maybe sometimes just let them have their nice time, instead of setting out to ruin it.

This is just my opinion, mind you.

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Uprooted
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quote:
Originally posted by Lisa:
Since Judaism is not a faith-based religion, and there aren't any leaps of faith, your continuing to claim otherwise is most certainly belligerent.

Lisa, I haven't been following the other thread at all so I'm coming at this with no background. But I'm interested in what you mean by that. How is any religion not based on faith? Would you practice Judaism if you didn't believe in God - and is that not faith?

I'm not trying to be belligerent or attack in any way, I'm honestly just curious as to what you mean.

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Samprimary
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quote:
You and the rest of the Hatrack religion hating crowd
P.S.: I'm not part of a "hatrack religion hating crowd" and pointing out that Judaism is a faith-based religion over the protests of those who insist that it is a factually proven religion that 'does not require leaps of faith' does not make you a 'religion hater.'

quote:
I'm not saying you can't ever talk about how every religious person is stupid and wrong, but maybe consider the situational appropriateness of this.
I don't have to consider the situational appropriateness of this, because it's not something I ever do.

Maybe you are seriously inclined to confuse me with someone else.

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TomDavidson
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quote:
How is any religion not based on faith?
Lisa and Armoth both believe that because their tradition teaches that thousands of people actually heard God and saw a miracle, this proves the event happened. The logic goes like this: wouldn't someone who was supposed to have been there say, "Hey, that didn't happen?!" if it didn't actually happen?

I find this to be a premise that is flawed in many, many ways. Certainly to compare it to the moon landing (as has been done here recently) is more than a little ridiculous.

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Uprooted
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Thanks, Tom.
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Armoth
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:
How is any religion not based on faith?
Lisa and Armoth both believe that because their tradition teaches that thousands of people actually heard God and saw a miracle, this proves the event happened. The logic goes like this: wouldn't someone who was supposed to have been there say, "Hey, that didn't happen?!" if it didn't actually happen?

I find this to be a premise that is flawed in many, many ways. Certainly to compare it to the moon landing (as has been done here recently) is more than a little ridiculous.

It's a bit more complicated than that:

http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/proof-torah-true/

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Armoth
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:
You and the rest of the Hatrack religion hating crowd
P.S.: I'm not part of a "hatrack religion hating crowd" and pointing out that Judaism is a faith-based religion over the protests of those who insist that it is a factually proven religion that 'does not require leaps of faith' does not make you a 'religion hater.'

quote:
I'm not saying you can't ever talk about how every religious person is stupid and wrong, but maybe consider the situational appropriateness of this.
I don't have to consider the situational appropriateness of this, because it's not something I ever do.

Maybe you are seriously inclined to confuse me with someone else.

Samp. C'mon. It IS something you do.

Personally, I enjoy talking to you (when we both remain level-headed), but at the same time, it's a pretty good point.

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TomDavidson
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Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?
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Armoth
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?

I'm not sure it will be as simple as back and forth posting, but for rhetorical purposes, if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that, I would have serious doubts.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Uprooted:
quote:
Originally posted by Lisa:
Since Judaism is not a faith-based religion, and there aren't any leaps of faith, your continuing to claim otherwise is most certainly belligerent.

Lisa, I haven't been following the other thread at all so I'm coming at this with no background. But I'm interested in what you mean by that. How is any religion not based on faith? Would you practice Judaism if you didn't believe in God - and is that not faith?

I'm not trying to be belligerent or attack in any way, I'm honestly just curious as to what you mean.

Sure. I guess it's a matter of definition. My father told me about some things that happened the day I was born. Some of it was on the wonky side. They gave my mother too much ether to knock her out and had to resucitate me after they pulled me out with foreceps. That's certainly not the usual way people get born, but I'm pretty much convinced that it's true, because he was there.

He also told me that his father had told him that our family name used to be Orens. He had no proof of that other than what his father told him, and I didn't even have proof that my grandfather told him that, since I never heard it myself. Because I relied on that, I was able to find more of our family (turns out we're a lost branch of a lost branch), and now I'm in contact with relatives I never knew I had, some of whom are pretty cool. Others of whom are famous, and not cool at all.

Human beings aren't animals. We pass information down from one person to another. From one generation to another. Yes, information can get garbled. We all know about the game "telephone", where you whisper something to the person next to you, and they whisper it to the next person, and so on, until it comes back to you and it's nothing even remotely close to what you started out with. But in the case of the Torah, we weren't whispering. And it wasn't just a single line of relating the information; it was tens of thousands of lines in every generation, crisscrossing back and forth for redundancy. And all starting with a very large number of people who heard God talk to them.

Now... do I know that God really did talk to them? Nope. Could have been an advanced alien race, or something. But it was clearly way out of the normal human experience, and whatever it was told them it was God.

My reason and my experience tell me that my people were absolutely convinced that God was speaking to them. Every attempt I've heard to claim that this conviction was invented later and read back into the past has been almost pathetically inadequate to explain simple things. So while that's a possibility, I consider it so improbably as to be not worth spending a lot of time on.

The more I learn, the more I find consistent in the Torah. And by Torah, I don't just mean the Bible, but all the law and lore we received at Sinai.

I don't think it's provable fact that it's all true. And I recognize that it's possible some non-God entity fooled my ancestors and/or that all the information I have at hand only coincidentally fits together into a coherent whole. But again, the likelihood of that is remote, and I'd have to see some pretty hefty proof to convince me otherwise.

An early church father named Tertullian was known to have said, "Credo, quia absurdum". That he believed because it's absurd. That sort of idea has always been very foreign to Judaism.

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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:
How is any religion not based on faith?
Lisa and Armoth both believe that because their tradition teaches that thousands of people actually heard God and saw a miracle, this proves the event happened. The logic goes like this: wouldn't someone who was supposed to have been there say, "Hey, that didn't happen?!" if it didn't actually happen?

I find this to be a premise that is flawed in many, many ways. Certainly to compare it to the moon landing (as has been done here recently) is more than a little ridiculous.

Strawman. Maybe you should allow people to state their own opinions instead of reformulating them yourself and getting things wrong.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Armoth:
quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?

I'm not sure it will be as simple as back and forth posting, but for rhetorical purposes, if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that, I would have serious doubts.
Ditto.
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Javert
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quote:
And it wasn't just a single line of relating the information; it was tens of thousands of lines in every generation, crisscrossing back and forth for redundancy. And all starting with a very large number of people who heard God talk to them.
How do you know that? Do you have empirical evidence of all those lines, or just anecdotal evidence that they exist?

Meant as a serious question.

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TomDavidson
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quote:
if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that...
Sure. Here's a whole jumble of possibilities:

About ninety people saw something happen one day that they didn't understand, similar to seeing the Virgin Mary in the sun. One guy came along and put it into some context. As they passed the story down, the number of people present grew in the same way that, today, everyone alive in the '60s was at Woodstock. From time to time, skeptics questioned the story. Since the culture had a long tradition of killing dissidents and re-discovering lost law (consider Josiah, in Kings, "re-introducing" the book of Deuteronomy to people), it was fairly simple to ensure that the story kept the desired shape as the cult grew; after all, the story itself includes a description of how nearly a third of the people present for the revelation got themselves killed for not being sufficiently loyal to God. Surely the survivors would be highly motivated to accede to the public story.

No miracle is needed; social pressure and the threat of expulsion does it all, especially at a distance of even a small handful of generations. How many grandchildren of people kicked out of the tribe for not believing their ancestor's story about the time they heard God would have bothered to keep their objections alive in story and song?

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Samprimary
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quote:
Originally posted by Armoth:
Samp. C'mon. It IS something you do.

No. I don't. You can look through my entire posting history, and you won't find a single instance of it occurring. In the absence of any instance of it occurring, it's a flat-out incorrect assumption on your part. Now, what does it take for you to be able to acknowledge that? Tell me. I want to know what your threshold for correction is.
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scholarette
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Tom-there was an interesting article on slate a few months ago that talked a lot about doctoring memories- like they convinced a bunch of people that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld (not possible since Bugs is not Disney). This was done with just suggestions. And then slate put up a bunch of pics of newsworthy events, some doctored, some real and people got it wrong, but swore they remembered the events in question happening (I think they had Obama meet with Iranian president in person which hasn't actually happened). People gave really high levels of confidence for some and even backed it up with other memories- like I remember that cause that was the day X happened. I thought it was a really interesting series of articles that showed just how flawed human memory is.

I don't think I am in the religious hating side of hatrack, but I do roll my eyes when people say their religion is rational, non-faith based. Maybe cause I'm LDS and that is a big talking point for LDS (we have all this proof, we must be right), I find it more annoying than others (when my faith is being stupid, it is worse than when someone else's and hearing other religions make similar arguments doesn't really work for me either). I find it takes too much mental gymnastics for me to view the arguments as rational. Too many holes and potential holes. It is much easier for me to simply accept my religious beliefs on faith.

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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by Javert:
quote:
And it wasn't just a single line of relating the information; it was tens of thousands of lines in every generation, crisscrossing back and forth for redundancy. And all starting with a very large number of people who heard God talk to them.
How do you know that? Do you have empirical evidence of all those lines, or just anecdotal evidence that they exist?

Meant as a serious question.

Nice to see you around Javert! [Smile]

I still sometimes wonder if I should finish your Godless Bible Study reading of John, but I think interest tapered off with my last post in that thread.

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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Javert:
quote:
And it wasn't just a single line of relating the information; it was tens of thousands of lines in every generation, crisscrossing back and forth for redundancy. And all starting with a very large number of people who heard God talk to them.
How do you know that? Do you have empirical evidence of all those lines, or just anecdotal evidence that they exist?

Meant as a serious question.

Good question. Have you ever seen this? I have a Torah family tree that goes back much further, and is much, much wider. And that isn't just anecdotal. Granted, the fact that it existed before the common era to that degree is more anecdotal, but again, there's no plausible explanation for that many people spread out that widely around the known world, adopting a common myth in this way. I accept that they may have invented it, but they would have to have done so with intent to deceive, and they would have had to have been absolute geniuses at their work.
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TomDavidson
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Why would they need to have been geniuses? It seems to me that a handful of persuasive people with friends who're willing to kill dissenters would do just fine.
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Javert
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quote:
Originally posted by Lisa:
I accept that they may have invented it, but they would have to have done so with intent to deceive, and they would have had to have been absolute geniuses at their work.

I think you may give them far too much credit, but to each their own.
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kmbboots
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quote:
Originally posted by Armoth:
quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?

I'm not sure it will be as simple as back and forth posting, but for rhetorical purposes, if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that, I would have serious doubts.
See. If Tom felt like providing an alternative for, say, the mass revelation of Pentecost passed down through oral tradition until it was written down within the lifetime of some that had been present, I wouldn't be all that fussed. Hence, faith-based.
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MattP
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quote:
I accept that they may have invented it, but they would have to have done so with intent to deceive, and they would have had to have been absolute geniuses at their work.
This is one of the primary arguments in support of the Book of Mormon not being a fabrication by Joseph Smith.

Human genius is much more prevalent than the claimed miracles of any given faith of the scope for which genius is presented as the so-unlikely-it-should-be-dismissed alternative.

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Xavier
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I am a dictator of a small and primitive clan. I decide one day that to cement my power, I will devise a myth claiming that my rules were not created by me, but passed down by a deity.

I tell my trusted guards and lieutenants that my grandfather was visited by a deity and the rules were given to him and passed down to me.

One of my lieutenants goes a step further and says that his grandfather was there as well. I give him great favor for his ingenuity and support.

Others catch on and make similar claims that their ancestors were there. Before long, claiming to have an ancestor that was at the revelation becomes a requirement for favor by me.

Some doubt my claims. I threaten them with death or kill them outright. Most go along willingly enough. After all, my story gives them a divine right to the land we all occupy! Why question it?

My supporters pass these claims onto their children, as surely they must never waver in their dedication to me. The tale grows in the telling. It isn't many generations long before all sorts of embellishments are added.

Eventually, the current tale is encoded in scripture and becomes the basis for a religion.

Obviously this is just one possible way for this tale to develop (pulled from my rear), there are many other ways it could have happened, none relying on the supernatural.

I consider myself a pretty "unbiased and calm observer", but this national revelation story just doesn't seem to hold as much water as Judaism seems to think it does.

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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Why would they need to have been geniuses? It seems to me that a handful of persuasive people with friends who're willing to kill dissenters would do just fine.

And no mention of such bloodbaths? When exactly do you think this dissenter-killing would have taken place? Before Alexander the Great? After? Before the common era? After? There's no real time that works for this theory.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by kmbboots:
quote:
Originally posted by Armoth:
quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Armoth: if I can demonstrate to you why the event you describe does not constitute legitimate proof, will you renounce your faith?

I'm not sure it will be as simple as back and forth posting, but for rhetorical purposes, if you can undermine the strength of the mass revelation and the unbroken line of tradition toward that, I would have serious doubts.
See. If Tom felt like providing an alternative for, say, the mass revelation of Pentecost passed down through oral tradition until it was written down within the lifetime of some that had been present, I wouldn't be all that fussed. Hence, faith-based.
Well, yeah, Christianity is obviously faith-based. See the Tertullian quote above.
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TomDavidson
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Kate: as I understand it, many Orthodox Jews see a distinction between this particular mass revelation and other claims of mass revelation because this one presumably involves people they identify as direct ancestors. I think it's a rather false distinction for a variety of reasons, but I've specifically avoided comparing it to other mass revelations out of respect for that perceived difference.
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Javert
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quote:
Originally posted by MattP:
Human genius is much more prevalent than the claimed miracles of any given faith of the scope for which genius is presented as the so-unlikely-it-should-be-dismissed alternative.

Human genius also, it seems, is far too often judged based on emotion as opposed to any objective judgment. And I do not exclude myself from that.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by MattP:
quote:
I accept that they may have invented it, but they would have to have done so with intent to deceive, and they would have had to have been absolute geniuses at their work.
This is one of the primary arguments in support of the Book of Mormon not being a fabrication by Joseph Smith.
I don't follow. No one ever heard of the Book of Mormon before Joseph Smith came along, and there was certainly no mass revelation. What "genius" are you talking about? Is it the same as the "genius" that Muslims see in the Qur'an?
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kmbboots
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Okay. I don't see why that makes it more reliable. But okay.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Kate: as I understand it, many Orthodox Jews see a distinction between this particular mass revelation and other claims of mass revelation because this one presumably involves people they identify as direct ancestors. I think it's a rather false distinction for a variety of reasons, but I've specifically avoided comparing it to other mass revelations out of respect for that perceived difference.

Again, if you'll let us speak for ourselves, you'll avoid making claims about us that are simply not true.
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Raymond Arnold
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quote:
Tom-there was an interesting article on slate a few months ago that talked a lot about doctoring memories- like they convinced a bunch of people that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyworld (not possible since Bugs is not Disney). This was done with just suggestions. And then slate put up a bunch of pics of newsworthy events, some doctored, some real and people got it wrong, but swore they remembered the events in question happening (I think they had Obama meet with Iranian president in person which hasn't actually happened). People gave really high levels of confidence for some and even backed it up with other memories- like I remember that cause that was the day X happened. I thought it was a really interesting series of articles that showed just how flawed human memory is.
That's neat sounding. I'd be interested in reading the full article.

There was an article on magicthegathering.com recently about how Memory relates to game design. The article was a reprint from eight years ago - the columnist was sick that week and said he didn't have time to write a new article. It talked a lot about how people's memories of cards/games/rules become distorted over time.

During the week, the columnist tweeted "out of curiosity, who remembers reading this article when it first ran 8 years ago?" And a sizeable number of people said "I do." (He also tweeted a number of random Inception references).

Next week he revealed there had never been an original article. Then went on to write an article about the crafting of the "fake memory" article. The whole thing was pretty brilliant IMO.

Random other note: if you haven't seen it yet, the Basketball Test is pretty good.

The last real discussion I had with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about his faith had ended with him finally, after years of claiming there were coherent logical reasons for his beliefs, admitting that he didn't have particularly clear, logical reasons that he could spell out. But that he couldn't believe he was that delusional. That was a few years ago, and I let it drop. Since then I've become less inclined to argue with people about their religion - if it's making them happy, well, okay. I'm still open to the possibility of some kind of god existing. But I have heard numerous people from numerous religions make the exact same claims of "I have a logical reason," often using very similar proofs, and have yet to see a reason that was actually strong and valid. (And I think it's perfectly reasonable to discuss my beliefs on this matter in a thread pretty much dedicated to said discussion)

What I've been realizing recently is the extent to which "I can't be that delusional" isn't even something people should feel embarrassed about. Ignoring religion completely, there is a pretty damn high chance that you are flat out wrong about a LOT of things you think you have perfectly good reasons to believe. The human brain really is that fallible - as fallible now as it was thousands of years ago when we knew less than 1% what we know about the universe now. We are realizing now the extent to which eyewitness testimony isn't that valuable a form of evidence even for events happening today.

We use written eyewitness documents to learn about history because it's the best tool we have available, not because it's a remotely definitive one. And most of the time, whether something in particular happened in history ultimately just doesn't matter all that much. If we found DNA evidence tomorrow that somehow survived 200 years and says that George Washington was hispanic... well, that's really weird and interesting and would have some ramifications, but ultimately doesn't change anything about the modern world.

Maybe somewhere out there is a valid reason to believe in any particular diety, but eyewitness testimony just isn't good enough.

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TomDavidson
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Many Mormons argue that the Book of Mormon is such a work of majesty (and so close in style to what it claims to be) that it would be nigh-impossible for someone to fake it.

In general, religions greatly overestimate the rarity of the artifacts they use as evidence.

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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Xavier:
I am a dictator of a small and primitive clan. I decide one day that to cement my power, I will devise a myth claiming that my rules were not created by me, but passed down by a deity.

I tell my trusted guards and lieutenants that my grandfather was visited by a deity and the rules were given to him and passed down to me.

One of my lieutenants goes a step further and says that his grandfather was there as well. I give him great favor for his ingenuity and support.

Others catch on and make similar claims that their ancestors were there. Before long, claiming to have an ancestor that was at the revelation becomes a requirement for favor by me.

Some doubt my claims. I threaten them with death or kill them outright. Most go along willingly enough. After all, my story gives them a divine right to the land we all occupy! Why question it?

My supporters pass these claims onto their children, as surely they must never waver in their dedication to me. The tale grows in the telling. It isn't many generations long before all sorts of embellishments are added.

Eventually, the current tale is encoded in scripture and becomes the basis for a religion.

Obviously this is just one possible way for this tale to develop (pulled from my rear), there are many other ways it could have happened, none relying on the supernatural.

I consider myself a pretty "unbiased and calm observer", but this national revelation story just doesn't seem to hold as much water as Judaism seems to think it does.

Give me a timeline when this could have happened with Judaism. It has to include the ability for such a bloodbath to occur without any record of it, and without any record of dissent. And it has to show a record of development. If there were no fossils, would you consider evolution a tenable hypothesis? Just because you can come up with a story for it?
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TomDavidson
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Raymond: absolutely. I think being willing to own up to the fact that we are capable of being delusional -- and, moreover, are almost certainly wrong about enormous chunks of our own experience, much less the real world -- is an increasingly important skill.
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MattP
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quote:
I don't follow. No one ever heard of the Book of Mormon before Joseph Smith came along, and there was certainly no mass revelation. What "genius" are you talking about? Is it the same as the "genius" that Muslims see in the Qur'an?
The comparison was to the hypothetical fabrication of the story, not to the hypothetical observation of the event. You asserted an element of genius required for such a fabrication. I noted similar assertions in support of an event that you don't believe to have occurred.
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TomDavidson
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quote:
It has to include the ability for such a bloodbath to occur without any record of it...
Not necessarily. Like I said, lots of Jewish stories include lots of recorded bloodbaths. All you need to do is overlook the reason.

What if there were no Golden Calf, but the ones who said they hadn't heard God say anything were all killed?

(Bear in mind, too, that a far greater bloodbath occurred during the plagues of Egypt, and certainly no records of those plagues exist.)

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Samprimary
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Another bad comparison to science. Fossils are not inherently required to make evolution a tenable hypothesis, given that we have observed speciation in labs. It just helps a lot.

Also, bloodbaths large and small can occur and escape the 'record of dissent.' Especially when not held to artificial standards of plausibility. They tend to happen in south america fairly regularly even in the modern era. In the era of history we're talking about? Easily.

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Samprimary
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In addition, from one of the last times we went through this.

quote:
It's really not that hard to get an entire ethnic or religious group to buy into fiction. It's happening right now. Scientology, for instance, perpetuates an obviously and clearly fraudulent history of, among other things, its chief prophet. He's come along recently enough that there exists numerous reliable documentation sources disproving all of the things that the religion claims as fact about him, but this is completely irrelevant to the movement's faithful for the same reasons why it is plausibly possible to perpetuate a myth about mass revelation. You just claim it on behalf of people who are now dead.

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Xavier
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quote:
It has to include the ability for such a bloodbath to occur without any record of it, and without any record of dissent. And it has to show a record of development.
I'm the dictator. I control those keeping the records. Why would I let them record the dissent?
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Mucous
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quote:
Originally posted by Lisa:
... If there were no fossils, would you consider evolution a tenable hypothesis?

Actually yes, because genetics is actually as strong (or even a stronger) evidence for evolution than even fossils.
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Lisa
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Fooey. You say that after the fact.
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advice for robots
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
Many Mormons argue that the Book of Mormon is such a work of majesty (and so close in style to what it claims to be) that it would be nigh-impossible for someone to fake it.

In general, religions greatly overestimate the rarity of the artifacts they use as evidence.

If those arguments ever convinced a skeptic, I'd say that person was a poor skeptic.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Xavier:
quote:
It has to include the ability for such a bloodbath to occur without any record of it, and without any record of dissent. And it has to show a record of development.
I'm the dictator. I control those keeping the records. Why would I let them record the dissent?
The god-kings of Egypt tried to wipe out any record of Pharaoh Akhnetan. How'd that work for them? You aren't being realistic.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
In addition, from one of the last times we went through this.

quote:
It's really not that hard to get an entire ethnic or religious group to buy into fiction. It's happening right now. Scientology, for instance, perpetuates an obviously and clearly fraudulent history of, among other things, its chief prophet. He's come along recently enough that there exists numerous reliable documentation sources disproving all of the things that the religion claims as fact about him, but this is completely irrelevant to the movement's faithful for the same reasons why it is plausibly possible to perpetuate a myth about mass revelation. You just claim it on behalf of people who are now dead.

None of them claim that the information in their religion was known continuously throughout the generations, and none of them claim that they were witness to the information coming to the world. They all acknowledge that Hubbard started it.
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Lisa
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
Also, bloodbaths large and small can occur and escape the 'record of dissent.' Especially when not held to artificial standards of plausibility. They tend to happen in south america fairly regularly even in the modern era. In the era of history we're talking about? Easily.

Do you see the problem with what you just said? Nah, probably not. The fact is, you know about those bloodbaths. So in what way is there no record?
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