seebs

Perhaps I am mistaken.

When you said:

I inferred from this that you believe claims of the supernatural to be false claims, and that your belief is strong enough that you believe people who believe otherwise should be "educated" into changing their minds.

Amie

Yes things have changed. Some things remain the same though...
Starboy what would you like to see differently? Do you view most societal problems as religiously stemmed? I am really interested in your thoughts...


Seebs and Starboy I just want you both to know that you both type way too damn fast...sprained and wrapped up wrist so I am trying to keep up

Starboy

Seebs, consider how much more useful it would be for US foreign policy if our President did not think of the leader of North Korea as evil and instead got the best psychological opinions. If he was paranoid or schizophrenic or delusional, I can't help but think that would be a much more useful way of thinking about him than by calling him evil. The problem with the term evil is that is has no prescriptive power. It harkens back to an age when that was the best they could do. In this day and age we have much better understanding of human behavior. By boiling everything down to good and evil it severely limits your ability to think rationally about it. It turns everything into this epic battle that has been going on since creation. How first century can you get?

Starboy

seebs

Would it, really? All the psychology in the world might tell you how to deal with Hitler as a patient - but the idea of "evil" tells you how to deal with his plans; you stop them, even at great cost.

Fallacy of the excluded middle, redux. This is the same as your attack on anyone accepting even a single supernatural explanation by asking if "demon possession" is a good model for figuring out what's wrong with a car. The options are not:

1. There is no good or evil.
2. Everything must come down to questions of good and evil.

There is a third option, which is that some things may be good or evil, and some may not be.

Good and evil are a useful model for interacting with the world. The Dalai Lama has proposed replacing them with "helpful" and "harmful", but once you sort out indirect effects and such, this seems to be pretty much the same thing; we distinguish between things we should endorse, and things we should oppose.

For all that you complain about Bush's simplistic attitude, you're doing the same exact thing; you've invented a category of "wrong thought" which you oppose, and the mere fact that you don't call it evil doesn't change the way in which you oppose it.

Starboy

seebs, that is a big leap. It was my intent that people would understand that the thought processes of the first century are not suited to this day and age. That Christianity is an inappropriate ethos for our time. It would be best for all of us if it just went away, along with all the other supernatural religions.

Starboy

seebs

You keep going on about the "thought processes" of another age, but formal logic hasn't changed in a long time; what you object to doesn't look at all like a thought process.

You say it would be best for everybody if Christianity went away. This cannot be true unless Christianity is false; thus, your opposition to it is rooted firmly in the affirmitive claim that it is specifically false.

In other words, you have a worldview which you think is *so* correct, that people who hold conflicting world views should stop. And that's *exactly* what you're complaining about in religions, so why are you doing it?

And, once again: All the stuff about age is irrelevant. People fell in love two thousand years ago, does that invalidate love? You keep attacking these things, but in the end, all of your attacks depend on the belief that these other belief systems are *wrong*. Trying to sugarcoat it by calling it "outmoded" instead of "wrong" changes nothing; you are claiming that other models are somehow "invalid", or "bad", or "to be avoided"... and it all comes down to the same thing; you think
*your* model is the right one, and everyone should be using it.

Starboy

seebs, do you honestly believe that boiling everything down to good and evil is a useful and rational way to approach life? I now understand why you are so upset by my posts. You are a binary thinker. It is impossible for you to conceive of the possibility that I might advocate that Christianity be abandoned not because I thought it was wrong, but because I thought it was useless, even harmful. I’ll bet you equate useless with wrong. Seebs, I don’t think that way. There is an entirely new way of thinking that resulted in the scientific revolution. I do not boil everything down into binary dichotomies. To do so, would be a fallacy.

Starboy

seebs

No. In fact, I just said so, so it seems to me that you're having trouble with my idea that "good and evil" are useful *some of the time*; neither "always useful" nor "never useful".

To be useless or harmful, it *must* be wrong, because it makes claims of utility. They happen to be untestable claims, but if they are *true* claims, then it is neither useless nor harmful.

I don't think I'm a "binary thinker" in the way you suggest; I am starting to wonder about you, though. You keep saying "boiling everything down to good and evil", even in direct response to my explanation of how these are useful *sometimes* but *not always*.

A fallacy like asserting that the only options are "everything boils down to good and evil" or "good and evil are useless concepts"? Sure, sure you don't boil everything down into binary dichotomies.

Everything here, you've asserted that it's all-or-nothing. When I argued that people might find some benefit in considering supernaturalistic explanations for *some* things (but not most things), you retaliated with a comment about a demon-possessed car. Sure sounds like a binary dichotomy to me; you can't accept a position statement that says "this model is useful for some things".

Starboy

Ok, sorry. I now see that you are picking up on statements from conversations we had on different threads. It threw me off.

I understand that you claim that complete adherence to good and evil is inappropriate and that using supernatural explanations for everything is also inappropriate. I understand your position. I will assume you are very clear on when you should use the supernatural explanations and when you should use good and evil. Good for you.

From my point of view, resorting to supernatural explanations of any kind is unnecessary. Sure, you can do it if you like, but there are better ways of explaining things. Yes I know, the big questions are best handled with supernatural explanations. But those questions are stated in such a way as to beg a supernatural answer, and the so-called big questions don’t have much relevance to anything.

What alarms me about supernatural religion is that people see it as "truth" and therefore apply to everything. Even you seebs can see the danger in that, since you understand that it does not apply to everything. But when you allow supernatural over natural explanations to be “true”, it is a slippery slope that leads to fundamentalism. It is a common way to think that “true” is “true” for one and all. This is just one of the problems with “truth” and the supernatural. It does lead to first century thinking; the kind of thinking that can be seen in our White House today. Seebs, it is scary and dangerous, too much of a risk to keep around just to answer the big questions.

Starboy

seebs

Well, it seems to work, anyway.

Sure, they do! They have relevance to *everything*. It's like the question of whether or not our experiences are real; it affects either nothing or everything.

I don't have the vaguest idea what you're trying to get at by putting "truth" in quotes. I think my religion is "true". However, that doesn't mean it's the only way for me to learn about the world; it just means that, for the questions it answers, I trust its answers.

First off, I would point out that slippery slope is generally considered a *fallacy*, because there is no guarantee that the slope is all that slippery.

I don't know that most people take supernatural explanations "over" natural ones. To use your example of the car, I don't know anyone who would take "car is possessed" over "car has engine trouble". Even among fundamentalists. So I don't think it's that big a concern.

I believe that it is "true" that I am exchanging messages with someone called Starboy on IIDB. I believe this is true no matter who does or doesn't know about it; someone who thinks it is untrue is simply *wrong*.

I still don't see exactly where you draw the line around "first century thinking". It really sounds, to this outside observer, as though you've assigned "modern thinking" the same status that fundamentalists assign to "Biblical truth", and are making the same kinds of mistakes because of it.