TerryTryon

I meant no insult directed at anyone in particular at the end of my short essay. The paragraph was a list meant to characterize ways by which those enmeshed in magical thinking seek to participate in debates with skeptical naturalists, and why they fail so miserably at communicating. There is simply no basis for fruitful interaction because there is no shared vocabulary.

The essay is a rough outline of my worldview, and the worldview of those from whom I share knowledge. That Albert found the essay vacuous merely illustrates the incompatibility of the thinking of magic believers with the thinking those of us who are willing to accept uncertainty as the price one pays to keep one's mind unified and avoid compartmentalization.

One goal in any search for truth is to avoid paradox and compartmentalization, such that everything one holds to be true is true across all situations. To believe that the mind is purely a function of brain/nervous system activity on Monday, but to pray for one's immortal soul on Sunday is an example of compartmentalization. This is what is avoided by holding all propositions provisionally.

diana

Non-sequitor.

You asked if it's rational to believe in something even though it doesn't exist. I, assuming that something that does not exist will, therefore, exhibit no evidence of existence, said that any belief in something without evidence is not (and I add, cannot) be rational; it is emotional.

When did the question of truth enter the discussion?

Not exactly. Mr. Cipriani would probably agree with you, though.

I take the position that "belief" is something you have in the absence of evidence. If you have evidence, you have knowledge. I differentiate belief and knowledge in this manner because it preempts the old we-all-have-faith-just-in-different-things argument that so many theists are fond of.

I agree that the truth remains the same, whether or not anyone discovers or believes it. But we were discussing rationality, which I still insist must at some point be based upon evidence.

I concur completely. For this reason, I do not categorize "agnosticism" as the middle point of the "theist/atheist" continuum. I call myself an atheist because I do not believe in a god; this is not to say I know no god exists, which would be an absurd thing to say. I also take the position that we all are agnostics in the technical sense.

Probably, but it's been a while.

d

diana

So we remember what we were discussing, here's a recap:

Hm. The cave paintings illustrate and J. Campbell writes about the idea that animals have souls. This is an example of "a disembodied concept that works"? Perhaps I should have asked you to explain exactly what you mean by "and it works!" Do you believe animals have souls? Does your belief (on the off-chance you say Yes) make it so?

I have not, for the record, denied the presence of irrational concepts in our brains. I have noted that we label people as "psychic" if their ideas come true and "psychotic" if they don't. What this has to do with cave paintings and animal souls, I have no idea.

That was a masterful obfuscation, by the way.

d

Abrupt

Qua amateur art history dork, I find this a very queer thing to say. There are many interpretations of the Lascaux paintings, and while they are all virtually empirically equivalent, the idea that the images reveal "disembodied concepts" of animal souls is not very high on the list.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Terry,
You say you meant no insult. Neither did I in reference to Oxy. Since insults, like spilt salt, is on the table, allow me to help you be more coordinated next time by deconstructing your insult.

In the two paragraphs of your post that I took exception to you used the following words to describe theists and theistic conceptions:
I am a theist. Ergo, you were saying all those bad things about me and my conceptions tho you do not know me and can’t possibly know even 3% of my theistic conceptions.

You will notice that I never ever bad-mouth atheists as a group or atheism as an ideology. Individual atheists and individual posts, yes, but I wield no broad brush for ya’ll. I have respect for atheists as a group. How could I not, being once in that group myself?

So all’s I’m saying is that if you did not exhibit disdain for theists as a whole or theism in general, prickly pear theists like me would have a better chance of being less prickly. Then we might all get diplomas from the Rodney King “Can’t We Just All Get Along.” school of divinity.

Now to your last post. You said you
You see? This is more of the same. Magic is a sin. It was reviled in the Old Testament and the New Testament and can be seen as being implicitly proscribed in sacramental theology of the Church. On the other hand, paganism, the perpetual bane of monotheism, is always only one step away from magic. So for you to say that theists “fail so miserably at communicating” because of our magical thinking is simply breathtaking. From the golden calf at the base of Mount Sinai to the Church’s condemnation of the sin of simony, magical thinking is what theists have been fighting, not the basis of our beliefs. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

99Percent

Sorry for the delay in my answer, Albert Cipriani

So what, as Oxymoron explained what is important is that my eyes don't deceive me as to what is the real world, and that the optical information that my brain processes coincides and matches perfectly and more importantly that it can do so logically and in a consistent way with what the rest of my senses tell me. If I hear a rumble of rocks coming from above I tilt my head towards this direction, not down as that will put my life in a precarious and dangerous situation, I wouldn't survive not one day if my eyes were deceiving me. In fact I don't have a choice much less an emotional one as you imply. However to believe in a God when you cannot see one is indeed a choice and mostly an emotional one.Again, non-sequitur. What is also important which I already said, but you simply chose to ignore it entirely is:So when your senses tell you that there is in fact a god because you are perceiving the supposed characteristics of what this god is suppose to be (say Jesus Christ) then I am suppose to agree with you (and unconditionally so) because we through our language can share similar empirical observations even though we don't really know what you are exactly perceiving, only that you are perceiving something that is equal to what I perceive it. You also see the world upside down because you have the same lens that I have, so when you say up, its also up for me even though technically we don't exactly know how we trully perceive thing. Again, what is important is that we can arrive at an objectively equal interpretation of what we both see and agree wholly and without contradictions. When I say the rose is red you also agree its red, even though how exactly each one perceives it we will never know.I am curious to know why you are so confident that you are right when you haven't even addressed all of my arguments, and in fact dismiss them as a solipsic strawman. Its pure speculation on my part, but I have a feeling of desperation in your part in trying to prove yourself right."Mother Ship"? Puhleaze, can I shout Occam's Razor?!And you were upside down too. And things didn't fall but went "upwards". So what. Again, whats important is that up is alwaysdown, that things always go in the same direction when they are attracted by gravitational pulls, and that we both agree that up is up and down is down. No mother ships, or gods necessary.

Oh and BTW, I am a photography and astronomy buff so I understand perfectly what you mean by the "majesty" of large format camera focusing a scene on a ground glass. I am also a computer buff and I can see immediately when an image is displayed upside down in my screen, when I take a picture with my digital camera also upside down.

Oxymoron

Xians, full of love and respect for their fellow man and woman. .:banghead:

So far, I've garnered this from Albert's (as he calls them) "rants":

1.) All belief is subjective...
2.) ...so you might as well believe what makes you happy...
3.) ...even if you unknowingly believe a lie.

Let's deal with these points in turn:

1.) Maybe, but some beliefs are less subjective than others. Particularly the testable ones. These represent things that are "about as objective as you can get".

2.) Negative beliefs about ethnic groups, children, women, etc seem to give certain individuals personal validation. Presumably you do not despise racism, sexism, ageism and so on, because after all, "it's all subjective" and it makes people happy?
No doubt you also agree that Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Satanism, to name a few, are all equally valid belief system because they make the believer happy? Or (more likely), it's the case that somehow the whole Jesus thing is just "more right" than they are.

3.) Better not test any of your beliefs then, Albert. What an ass you'll feel if it turns out what makes you happy is a lie. The difference between an atheist like myself and a theist in this respect is that a believer gains validation through their untestable or untested assumptions about the world, whereas I feel happy about myself simply because of the sheer joy of existing as a sentient individual in such a beautiful and complex universe.

Believers, all of them, even - perhaps especially - the most fundamental, live in secret fear that the precious hokum that they have come to depend on for self-validation will be exposed for the ancient drivel that it is. For then where would they be? Look at the blasphemy laws in muslim countries: you can be killed for denying Mohammed. Why would fundamentalists, who believe the absolute truth of their scrolls absolutely, feel so insecure about dissent? They will go to any extent to defend it because they are not just defending a philosophy, they are defending what they fallaciously believe to be the very root of their existence.
I feel very sad for believers, because they clearly do not feel the simple joy of just being alive in a world full of interesting people and things. They will always, therefore, remain permanently disconnected from reality and humanity, propping up their lives with the dust of the past.

Lordy, I've gone all poetic.

Albert Cipriani

Thanks All,
For supplying so much grist for my mill. But my mill is broken. I’m experiencing the blue screen of death (The devil’s cockle seeds, no doubt.) and I must see about uprooting my operating system. Wish me and my computer friend luck while I wish you the virtue of patience.

But first let me do a little weeding:
Not a single dust particle of the universe, nor the universe as a whole is evidence of anything. All things are just that, things. For a thing to transcend its thing-ness, it must be known. That requires what most people call consciousness and what I simply call life.

Live things can know of things. Ergo, things transcend their thing-ness through being known by live things. A thing can become evidence for some thing else only through the life of another thing. By two things becoming one, evidence of a third thing may be inferred. The formula then becomes: life (or consciousness) + thing = evidence

And the gestation of evidence need not be a rational process. For example, infants suck. (I don’t mean that pejoratively!) They have no rational evidence that if they suck they will be able to drink milk and live. They just suck: suck fingers, suck blankees, suck toys, and lo and behold, they suck boobs! Pay dirt! They luck out and live.

Belief is not an integral part of, but an artifact of, this process. Our beliefs are cut adrift from both rational and irrational processes and from evidence. Most of my arguments with you guys is over your “belief” that the only permissible or true beliefs are those that involve rational processes. I am not so proud. My standards are far lower than that.

Brain scientists and psychology in general are on my side on this. Rational thought, like the tip of an iceberg, is responsible for but a fraction of what we know and of how we know it. In short, I accept beliefs borne upon the dark currents of the deep, not just those wafted to me on the sunlit wings of empiricism. Damn!, First you, Oxy, now me: this waxing poetic stuff has gotta stop! – Cheers, and Later, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Jobar

Believers, all of them, even - perhaps especially - the most fundamental, live in secret fear that the precious hokum that they have come to depend on for self-validation will be exposed for the ancient drivel that it is. For then where would they be? Look at the blasphemy laws in muslim countries: you can be killed for denying Mohammed. Why would fundamentalists, who believe the absolute truth of their scrolls absolutely, feel so insecure about dissent? They will go to any extent to defend it because they are not just defending a philosophy, they are defending what they fallaciously believe to be the very root of their existence.
I feel very sad for believers, because they clearly do not feel the simple joy of just being alive in a world full of interesting people and things. They will always, therefore, remain permanently disconnected from reality and humanity, propping up their lives with the dust of the past.

More truth than poetry, Oxy.

Albert, we all know that our waking awareness is only a small fraction of our mind- the tip of the iceberg, as you say.

But that's only one way of looking at it- let's try thinking of it as the central point of our field of vision. Our peripheral vision is wonderfully sensitive to motion, but when motion is detected we immediately look straight at it to determine precisely what is moving. We focus on it, so that the moving object of interest is perceived by the macula- the area of the retina where our 'center of attention' lies. (As you read these words their image falls on your macula.)

Using this analogy, it is only sensible that we should focus our conscious awareness on anything we find of interest- and that we then make our decisions about those things according to what our consciousness tells us. That is after all what it is for.

(Oh, and good luck with your computer problem. )

TerryTryon

Just because Christianity condemns competing systems of magical thinking does not show that Christianity is not a system of magical thinking itself. If the resurrection, the burning bush, the talking snake in the Garden of Eden, spiritual afterlife, transubstantiation, prophecy, the gift of tongues, healing by the laying on of hands, the fall of Jericho, casting out of demons, ad nauseam are not examples of sorcery, pure and simple, the only thing I can think of to do is go through every dictionary and make the addendum to every definition of "magic" and "sorcery" "except when similar things are claimed or practiced by Christians".