Peter Kirby

Don't confuse my hesitation about posting to IIDB (hardening into something more than hesitation) with a refusal to engage in critical dialogue. IIDB is not the "most critical dialogue-ish place on earth" (to abuse Disney), it is just one of many places to spend my time.

EverLastingGodStopper

Cough. http://peterkirby.blogspot.com/

Peter Kirby

At the suggestion of Sauron, I have a "temporary and prototypical" blog here:

http://thedarklingthrush.blogspot.com/

Enjoy if you will.

EverLastingGodStopper

nm then

You have everything else under your real name. Why you'd choose an entirely different ... nm then.

Peter Kirby

I have started to make some posts there. I urge you all who are interested to check it out and interact with me there. :grin:

GakuseiDon

You will find that some people will view even your non-faith statements in terms of what you believe, or at least what they think that you should believe.

spin

Better, the weather is a complex system. There are simply too many variables which should make the analogy with the human complex system clearer.

This is only natural with heuristic machines. All inputs influence the organism. Humans tend to congregate so their influences tend to be more human.

As heuristic machines humans are garbage in garbage out affairs. If good stuff is provided as stimulus that tends to get good results.

We play our part in reading and learning the script of this play. We know our parts well and perform them well. Children are such good learners.

We are as much responsible for our children as our parents are for us. So domestic violence spawns domestic violence and we blame the wife-beater for being the animal he was trained to be. It's not the fault of the person's parents or of the society that alienated them because we believe that the individual does have responsibility and so we blame the individual while more such poor nasty creatures are produced.

You can see the semen swimming against the tide: "I won't do it! I won't do it!"

We all have choice, don't we? What cereal for breakfast (Cruncho tastes better and cleans your teeth as you eat). Whether the dudes think I'll look better in peuce or khaki. Whether to keep renting or take out a mortgage on a box.

We are all responsible for the rape and the murder.

The distinction between minors and adults is a modern invention of deresponsiblizing the young. It's another meaningless distinction. On the life line we decide that children have no power or responsibility until they reach this or that point.

The choices your system makes are weighted choices. It can only choose from what is available to it.

Philosophy has nothing to do with. And to clarify, philosophy is actually two beasts: 1) the history of philosophical endeavor (each era has its own philosophical interests) and 2) the latest philosophical interest, ie what the legs of the latest bug do and how to pull them off.

Would you say education was basically philosophical? I wouldn't, though it includes sociology and psychology and various other inputs. (These broad subjects can be useful, but not necessarily.) The subject I'm dealing with is education at its widest. That will include linguistics (and sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics), neuropsychology

So you say my language is overdetermined, but we knew that already. Your pedantry is as well, but I couldn't hold it against you. Besides this general quibble is just a little tangent.

I really don't follow the logic. It takes a lot of work to make a suicide. The human organism, like all organisms, usually has the grime determine to stay alive, so by the time our man is on the top of the building all the work has been done. Merely taking him off the top of the building will change nothing. You have to give him the only thing that you've got: your self. But that's usually too much to give. You don't want the responsibility. It's his life, not yours. He should have control over his life. But he hasn't, so *poof* goes the responsibility moralizing.

If you are merely going to prevent him from doing the deed this time, what is the point? Compassion has nothing to do with salving the conscience. The dude hangs out until you've gone and checks into the nearest high building.

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-e.e. cummings

In all complex systems there is error.

See what I mean?

(Canada or Morocco?)

The magic word in this discourse is "we". If it were piddly "I", you'd have no real discourse at all. If "we" take some responsibility for "I", like a child with parental support or an alcoholic who can say to his group "it's been 68 days and I need a drink badly" and the group listens, understands, and strengthens his or her resolve to make it 69 days.

Compassion was what I was talking about before this long digression. Compassion is if you need my hand I can give it to you for now. I may need it back soon, but you can have it for as long as possible.

The discussion about overdetermination was just an effort to get around the anal retentive free choice rampant capitalist shill mentality. (Parse that!) You are less responsible than you think. So much of what you think is you is pastiche. You are a warping mirror. Heuristic machines are by their nature complex, but they are the sum of what they "absorb" and the arrangement of it. What's left is mainly dogma. What can you expect: you've been through seal-training until at least eighteen. Catch the ball, Bruno! Now right up on your tail. Oh boy, them fish taste good.

That's what you've been told.

In that "subjective" reflects how I learnt it.

Labelling it the way you feel comfortable with gives you some control over the idea. Overdetermination again.

You're welcome, Ted.

But I don't really understand why you don't. It seems so obvious to me.


spin

Vivo

Okay, I might sound like a jerk here, forgive me for that, but lemme drop my two cents please.

So this guy was an atheist for like ten years, wrote all this scholarly stuff on why religion is bs, and then viola he reconverts? Dude, you gave up. You fell pray to the opium. This is why religion survives! Because it is warm, communal, numbing, happy, easy! - allowing sentiment to overwhelm reason. People do what appeals to them, and religion is very appealing (even if not always in direct, obvious ways), hence its existence.

If you try to defend your position, just try to sound unlike how Sullivan did in his duel with Harris, appealing to unprovable emotions and feelings, which are in all truth readily explained by neuroscience (god-center anyone? : An evolved mechanism).

If my fellow atheists feel I'm off-base, go ahead, rip me a new one, but I find this severely disappointing.

Don't mistake me by the way, I don't have any problems with liberal religion. My best buddy is a Christian, and I am on close relations with my local Anglican church (the Dean is the coolest guy I've pretty much ever known. An awesome role model, seriously. So tolerant and funny, and smart too).

Toto

I don't recall Peter writing stuff on why religion is bs. He wrote about his deconversion based on logical arguments against the existence of God. He seems to have decided to reconvert (revert?) for more complex reasons.

Emotions and feelings are part of the human condition. They have helped the human species survive for generations.

It's not like Peter has drunk some Kool-Aid and now thinks that Gary Habermas was right all along.

Johann_Kaspar

Why? Does he have some kind of illness? Didn't he find god again? :notworthy:

Oh I see, faith is a very serious illness. Poor chap.