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Post by hazelireland on Apr 29, 2009 12:15:30 GMT
Hibernicus,
I have failed in my writings if I have given you the impression that I classify Catholicism at the same level of absurdity as aliens and leprechauns. This is not my intention and I am not sure where I indicated it was. I will endeavour to clarify rather than just accuse you of putting words in my mouth again.
What I said was that I classify them at the same level in terms of the amount of evidence I have been offered for each proposition. That is to say: None. What I said therefore above is that I do not use the term agnostic because I am agnostic about god as much as I am about the other things. Therefore the term becomes dilute to the point of uselessness.
But to classify them as the same level of absurdity is not what I intend to do. After all there is no reason to think there are Leprechauns. I have been given no evidence, not even BAD evidence, to suggest there might be.
With god however, I have seen lots of arguments that I can at least understand why people have been duped by and I am not unsympathetic to that. I do not join with my peers in saying “Faith is belief without evidence”. Nor do I find you deluded. I think that you can perfectly rationally reach the conclusion there is a god by making small errors.
I instead argue with my own peers in trying to advocate that faith is “The willingness to assume that which you are trying to prove” and when one does that one is SURROUNDED in supporting evidence. I do not think the same can be said of Leprechauns. I also think it fair to say that most of this evidence is in error, not irrational or deluded.
As for why I am here, please read the last 4 paragraphs of the post above. I hope it clarifies my attentions to you and shows them to be a little more pure than how you represented them just now.
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Post by hibernicus on May 14, 2009 11:58:26 GMT
First of all, Hazel is always complaining that religious believers have never given him any evidence to support the existence of God, but he never explains what he means by "evidence". Serious philosophical arguments have been advanced in previous arguments against his position, but he always responds by talking, not only as if he didn't agree with them, but as if they didn't exist/ hadn't been made at all. Secondly, he argues that the term "atheist" is meaningless because those described atheists hold many different intellectual positions, whereas "you only have to look att he teaching of Christ to know what Christianity is". Surely Hazel has noticed that there are many different interpretations of the teachings of Christ, and we have been arguing over them for the last 2000 years - so if Hazel's argument is correct the term "Christian" is meaningless as well, for the differences between (say) a Jehovah's Witness (Christian Unitarian) and a member of the Society of St. Pius X, or a Calvinistic Presbyterian, a Greek Orthodox and an American Episcopalian Modernist are quite as radical as those which he mentions, both in themselves and in terms of the practical consequences of those beliefs for the lives of those who profess them. Hazel is suffering from a pretty widespread human tendency whereby we are very aware of small differences amongst those with whom we generally agree, while those to whom we are fundamentally opposed appear relatively homogeneous because seen from a distance. (This is why Trotskyites or sedevacantists spend so much time arguing with other Trotskyites or sedevacantists.) Lastly, Hazel's response is very revealing about his underlying philosophical orientation. He's an extreme nominalist who believes that general nouns are simply conventional descriptions and that individual entities form the only observable reality (as distinct from the realist view in the existence of underlying essences and the ability of reason to perceive them). We saw this in his earlier denial that there are such things as natural/universal human rights. The trouble with this view is that the world does seem to be to some extent intelligible, whereas if Hazel's view is correct it would be an illegitimate exercise to formulate a hypothesis and test it by experiments, since every experiment would be unique and nonrepeatable and it would be impossible to exclude the possibility that however many times it was repeated the next result would be different. Hemingway once asked me how I could believe in the concept of original sin, but in fact a great deal of modern atheist polemic is based on or dramatises belief in a type of original sin or fundamental human flaw. For these writers, this flaw is a human tendency to see patterns in what are simply a series of random occurrences; so that we are all like paranoids who patch together a bunch of fragmentary observations into belief in an universal conspiracy. Thus, in Ian MacEwan's ENDURING LOVE the "villain's" religious faith which leads him to see the death of the man who fell from the balloon as the work of an overarching Providence (whereas the hero sees it simply as a random accident, whose significance lies only in the man's willingness to risk his life to save the child in the balloon) is equated with the same character's demented belief that the hero is secretly in love with him and wishes to leave his girlfriend for him. Similarly, MacEwan's ATONEMENT is built around the readers' willingness to accept the possibility of a story in which the lovers are reunited after suffering and the author of all their misfortunes can atone for her wrongdoing, whereupon it is revealed to the readers that this is a story within the story, that in the "real" world of the novel the lovers perished in miserable random catastrophes, and the idea that they ended happily is a consoling fiction created by the cause of all the trouble to soothe her troubled conscience; the past can never be undone and the idea of atonement for wrongdoing, or cosmic justice, is merely a consoling fiction. (MacEwan emphasises both in his work and in interviews that he is an atheist and his work embodies his convictions about the nature of reality, as any author's does - not as an external dramatisation, but in the fabric of the mind and sensibility.) Given that in the world as we know it the innocent suffer and not all stories end happily, is the "happy ever after" convention merely a fiction to shield us from the void, or does it reflect a deeper reality wich we see only fitfully when the full effects of the true Atonement are worked out and the true author's scheme becomes manifest? MacEwan's denial of the latter possibility is essentially an act of faith, and as Hazel does he shuts off the possibility by ruling it out in advance.
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Post by hazelireland on May 14, 2009 12:41:21 GMT
Hibernicus,
I see your quality of character and bravery requires you yet again to respond to me in the third person. If you think this approach demeans anyone aside from yourself then you are entirely wrong. That said I will not respond to your post, directly, as social decorum would see fit.
I do not, for good reason, tell you what I mean by evidence. I avoid bias in all it’s forms. If I were to tell you what evidence I want, I create a bias to that evidence only and I risk missing the real evidence when it comes in. Since, also, this is your god you are trying to present evidence for I do not know what evidence I require as I do not know the attributes of the god you are trying to argue for. The one thing I have discovered in my many travels is that what one person means by “god” is usually starkly different to the next, and the next.
No, I am open to ALL evidence you wish to present. That is how it works in the world. You make a case, say what it is you are arguing for, and then present your evidence and conclusions. In this you would tell me what it is you mean by “god” and what it is you think is evidence for same. I am willing and open to consider ALL such evidence and information and I never dismiss ANY out of hand without first explaining (usually at length) why I find it insufficient.
In summary, I will never pre-define what the evidence will be. How can I when I do not even know what it is you are specifically arguing for? It is up to the person making a case to provide it. I do not even know what you personally mean by “god” so you would first need to establish that.
How can I pre-define the evidence I require for attributes you have not yet provided?
Suffice to say no one has EVER shown me evidence for a non-human self-aware higher or even equal intelligence of any sort whether alien or deity, inside or outside this universe.
Yes, there are many different interpretations of Christ. However when you call someone a Christian you at least know exactly which text they rely on for their source material. So the term is not as dilute as you want to make out. An atheist however could be a nihilist. He could subscribe to eastern philosophy. He could be a Nazi. He could be an anarchist. He could be a Secular Humanist. Calling someone an atheist tells you NOTHING about what they are, where they source their material, or what they subscribe to, or who their leaders or idols may be. Call someone a Christian however and you can tell a LOT about them. If you fail to see that distinction then you have made a fundamental error at such a low level than anything you form on this foundation is going to be false.
But yes I am perfectly aware that there are over 32000 branches of Christianity and despite declaring Christianity to be the “Truth” with a capital T, even its adherents can not agree on any of it’s meanings. However you dilute even your own point and support mine when you show that for this reason you DON’T call them all Christian, but you do in fact qualify it by calling them “Christian Unitarian”, “Calvinistic Presbyterian”, “Mormon” and more. So you support me, not you, in this. You call them by what they ARE and when this does not suffice you get MORE specific, not LESS specific. My argument is that while you are getting MORE specific about Christianity (Such as calling yourself a roman catholic) you are getting LESS specific about what a person is with “Atheist”.
Yes, you call them by what they ARE not what they are NOT. You call them a “Calvinistic Presbyterian” not an “A-Roman Catholic”. You get MORE specific not LESS. In essence you make my point for me and for this I am grateful and although it clearly was not your intention it serves me very well thank you.
The rest of your comment is useless to me as yet again it is your attempt to label me in order to ascribe to me positions I have never espoused. I said it before and I trust I will have to say it again given the level of decorum you have displayed: If you can not deal with what I DO say then that’s one thing but do not reduce and demean yourself by instead attempting to label me and attack strawmen and positions that I have never espoused.
I will never, have never and would never pander to that. You demean ONLY yourself in this. Your lies about me shutting off possibilities in advance are just that: Lies. I am open to any possibility. I am open to the possibility that we all exist in the mind of trolls who have apple pies as heads and bananas as toes. It does not matter how OPEN to a possibility I am, until someone gives me a reason to think the possibility valid then it is just that, a possibility and no more.
The fact you have not given me any evidence for yours means I have no choice but to wait until you do. Claiming that is me shutting off the possibility in advance is just the cowardice of one who has nothing to offer and is unwilling to admit that. Lying about me, my character, my actions or my biases does not make you more right, nor will it ever.
You either have evidence, or you do not.
You will either provide it, or you will not.
So far you have not and this fact is 100% independent from any bias that I hold in reality, or in your imagination. Try harder.
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Post by hibernicus on May 14, 2009 18:42:35 GMT
I must say hazel's approach reminds me of one of the more amusing works of atheist literature, namely THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, in which a supercomputer set to work out the meaning of life, the universe and everything comes up with an incomprehensible answer and explains that in order to understand it its makers will have to find the question to which it is the answer. What we have here is a complete refusal to engage in dialogue. How refreshing to see that Hazel sees his mission in life as wasting everybody else's time by refusing to engage with the subject under discussion.`
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Post by Hemingway on May 14, 2009 22:39:21 GMT
I must say hazel's approach reminds me of one of the more amusing works of atheist literature, namely THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, in which a supercomputer set to work out the meaning of life, the universe and everything comes up with an incomprehensible answer and explains that in order to understand it its makers will have to find the question to which it is the answer. What we have here is a complete refusal to engage in dialogue. How refreshing to see that Hazel sees his mission in life as wasting everybody else's time by refusing to engage with the subject under discussion.` Hibernicus, c'mon. You are a bright bloke. You havent even attempted to address the points in the above post. Sate your position and tell us why. Thats what debates about. Let the readers hear your position and weight your arguement up and lets discuss this. Whats the problem here? Lets debate the topic.
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Post by hazelireland on May 15, 2009 7:46:54 GMT
Hibernicus,
So when I politely make a 13 paragraph response in the first person describing my position, why I hold it, what the arguments for it are and how I came to my conclusions I am “refusing to engage with the subject under discussion.”
Yet when you reply to me rudely in the third person, say nothing about the subject at hand, mock my position, lie about me and insult me by calling me a time waster you are engaging with the subject under discussion are you?
Puh-leese. If anyone else can not see something wrong with THIS picture then I have lost all hope. You are the definition of the word hypocrite as you sit there engaging in exactly what you are falsely accusing me of engaging in.
Not big. Not clever. Raise your game. SOME decorum please!
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 27, 2009 13:13:21 GMT
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Post by hazelireland on Jul 28, 2009 7:15:47 GMT
You disgust me sir, now you are just trolling for a reaction on top of all the other disgusting behaviour and dishonesty you have spewed on to this particular thread and then when pulled up on it ignored and cowered from for 2 months rather than apologise for.
North Korea is far from an atheist regime and you know it, nor is it the type of democracy that the atheists on this board have been espousing and you know that too. Or do you really think that free inquiry and open exploration of ideas is actually what is going on in North Korea? Puh-leese.
Do you have anything constructive to say or is your entire approach now going to be to try and illicit angry reactions by posting tripe and calling it atheism?
Take some time out, stop wasting time replying to yourself in the majority of the threads on this board and then go and you find a free democracy that has descended into such behaviours after adopting the teachings of people like Einstein, Democritus, Spinoza, Paine, Jefferson to name but a few and where free speech and exploration of all ideas, all books and all debate is supported... THEN we will have a level playing field on which to have a discussion.
Until then, your false equivocation is just an attempt to troll a reaction and you know it. Maybe you just needed a break from replying to yourself in the threads on the main board and this was the best you could come up with? A case of “Im posting post after post to myself and hardly anyone replies, so if I post something I know is tripe I will get a reply then”. Well here is one, do you feel big and clever now?
Or maybe you actually do think that a state run by the "Dear Leader" who has been dead for many years, but is semi re-incarnated in his son who is "Mr. Secretary" and is only head of the army actually sounds like anything the atheists here identify with or support? If you do then you clearly have not even bothered to read one word written here.
In fact, Father ruling from the after life… 2 people in one… reincarnation and leadership through the earthly son.... sounds a bit familiar to you at all? It is just one short of a trinity, and sounds a lot more like YOU guys run things than like WE want them run.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 28, 2009 10:04:41 GMT
I did not say that all atheists are like the Kims, but that North Korea (or, for that matter, Enver Hoxha's Albania) shows that atheist dominance does not necessarily lead to enlightenment and happiness. Hazel, it will be noted, adopts different definitions of religion as it suits him; previously he spoke of it in terms of truth-claims about the ultimate nature of reality, now he speaks of it as a Durkheimian phenomenon (what binds society together). North Korea can be defined as religious in the second sense, not the first. It's a mixture of Marxism and Confucianism (there is disagreement about whether Confucius was an atheist) taking all the most oppressive aspects of both. The Christian objection to the Kims is precisely the same that it was to the worship of the Roman emperors - that it gives to a man the honour that is due to God alone. Julian the Apostate callled us "atheists" for this. Defining Christianity as a form of atheism (which is how it appears to a pantheist or polytheist) would have about as much truth in it as denying that North Korea is an atheist state.
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Post by hazelireland on Jul 28, 2009 14:08:45 GMT
Again, North Korea has nothing to do with atheism and is nothing like what atheists on this board are espousing. If you cant even get your terms and definitions right you will get nowhere.
Get this simple notion through your head. All we are espousing on this board is a society which can freely express and explore all ideas and claims. All of these ideas and claims must have evidence that scales with the claim being made.
The idea of gods is one of these, an idea for which despite my vast amount of time and posting on this forum, you have provided quite literally no evidence for in the slightest.
That is it. If you think that position above leads to Dictatorships, murder, the stifling and even murder of people who disagree with you and worse, then I am AGOG to see you make the connection, I really am. Agog.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 28, 2009 15:45:12 GMT
I did not say that being an atheist automatically leads to murder and dictatorship; I said that it did not prevent it as some atheists claim. Saying that the Kims have nothing to do with atheism is like saying those religious who ran the industrial schools have nothing to do with Catholicism. We are talking in both cases about deformations which do have their roots in the original belief system. Last I heard, North Korea was a Marxist state, and Marxism is an expressly atheist belief system. That doesn't mean all atheists are Marxists, any more than they are all Randian anarcho-capitalists. Hazel says I am talking to myself on this board, but he is mistaken. I am a watchman on the walls of Zion, and day and night I praise my Lord.
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Post by hazelireland on Jul 29, 2009 7:11:53 GMT
Now at least you are on a better track. However I am not aware of any main stream atheist that claims that atheism prevents murder and dictatorship. Maybe you can point to one with evidence, quotations and links and I can see where you are coming from on this.
A free democracy and the open and free exploration of ideas DOES prevent dictoatorship. However in terms of murder, we are human, semi-evolved primates and I am afraid murder will be part of our species for a very long time.
Still AGOG to hear how you think the position I espoused above has anything to do with Marxism, a North Korean dictoatorship or any of the other tripe you associating it with? Do you see an open democracy with the free exploration of ideas and claims there?
No. Thought not.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 29, 2009 16:27:01 GMT
Richard Dawkins likes to claim that political fanaticism, persecution etc would all disappear if religion disappeared. That is the position I was criticising by pointing to the record of self-defined atheist states.
I don't think anyone on this board has actually defended child abuse and various other perversions of religion; that doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticised. I didn't say that any of the atheists posting on this board had defended the Kims.
By the way, I seem to remember Hazel on another thread some time ago denounced the idea of discussing "atheism" on the grounds that there were so many different types of atheist that they had relatively little in common. If he won't define atheism, how can he say the Kims (or anyone else) is NOT an atheist? I also seem to remember him maintaining that it was possible to be an atheist and still maintain an interest in the "transcendent". Transcendence is precisely what the Kim cult claims to provide.
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Post by hazelireland on Jul 30, 2009 7:09:38 GMT
Quotes links and references please, like I said. Dawkins does not say such a thing because you say he does. I want to see the facts.
As far as I know he has said no such thing, and although he sees it as A source of such things, he far from sees it as the only one. If indeed this was his position I would be the first to call him naive. It is the human conditions that leads us to such things and we have to address each source of it as it comes, including but not limited to religions.
But, as you do with me, I believe you are entirely inventing a position for him that he has never espoused. This tactic is, and has been, your forte on this forum.
As a case in point in fact, I am also not aware of where I said "the Kims (or anyone else) is NOT an atheist". I said no such thing. Will you ever tire of putting words in my mouth or inventing positions for people that they never held? Ever? Honestly? Try it once, you might find you end up talking with people instead of past them.
Try it. Try stopping for a second and listening to what the real me is saying, and not the fantasy me you have in your head. Here is what I am saying: These societies you mention are nothing remotely similar to what we are espousing. We espouse a free democratic society with the free expression and exploration of all ideas, and the onus of evidence on all those that would make a claim to something.
Thats it. No more. No less. So stop, I ask you for the umpteenth time, stop lying about me, putting words in my mouth, inventing positions I never held and generally eroding what little credibility you have left as a human being.
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