Goliath

Amaranth,

No, I asked the writers (who do not exist in fiction) to have one of the characters present a proof of a very famous open question in mathematics (which does not exist in fiction).

I'm sorry you feel this way about the discussion.

And I never said (nor will I ever say) that there aren't some similarities. However, to what almost everyone in this thread seems to be oblivious is that there are also differences, whence the analogy doesn't work as anything more than a vague generality.

Sincerely,

Goliath

Goliath

You know what? To fucking hell with this. I don't know why everyone is screaming at me in this thread. I don't know why everyone on this entire board seems to hate me. I just know that I'm tired of people taking things personally and getting overly defensive and insulting.

Since it's already been established (cf this thread) that my apologies will never be accepted, and since I'm sick and god damned tired of wading through insult after insult and being accused of saying things that I never said, I'm leaving.

Sincerely,

Goliath

Biff the unclean

But the god who allegedly wrote the bible via the human writers is (allegedly) omnipotent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but none of the characters in Buffy are omnipotent, and we have established that the writers aren't omnipotent either. Thus we have a difference between the bible and the show.
No, we haven't.
Even the most casual reading of the first few chapters of the first book of the bible shows so many laughable mistakes that any claims of omnipotence (or even competence) on the part of the authors must instantly be dismissed.
God has superpowers and the characters in Buffy have superpowers. They have different superpowers because they are in different stories, but they still have superpowers. Only fictional characters have superpowers.
In the John Carter on Mars books Edgar Rice Burroughs claims intimate knowledge of the super outer space hero John Carter. I think he claims to be his nephew or grand nephew, whatever he claims that Carter dictated these books to him about beautiful blue skinned maidens and six armed monsters. But of course that is only a literary device. It's part of the fictional story, not part of reality.
Like John Carter of Mars is a character and not the author that the novels claim he is. Same goes with God. He's only a character in a series of stories, he doesn't exist outside of them as the stories mistakes prove.

Nowhere357

I think that this thread shows that if a person believes in the Bible, then all those problems can be resolved.

The only hope is to instill some critical thinking skills.

The_Unknown_Banana

It's an analagy on buffy vs. the bible, don't take it so personally!! I think it was just a bit of fun in the first place. (I mean seriously, who's gonna take an analagy with buffy vs. god seriously?) Forum debates can be frustrating at times, for sure.

Calzaer

After perusing the cited thread, it seems to me that the problem between Goliath and the rest of the board is actually pretty simple, although not easily solved. I've encoutered it before.

I call it "Vampire Sneeze Syndrome". My ex-girlfriend had it (no, that's not why she's an ex). The syndrome is characterized as follows:

Our patient is told a joke. During the course of this joke, somewhere in the set-up, a vampire sneezes. The punchline of the joke is only tangentially related to the vampire's sneezing, and there is quite a bit of set-up between the vampire's sneeze and the punchline.

The syndrome becomes apparent when the patient, upon hearing the punchline, says "That doesn't make any sense at all. Vampires don't breathe, much less sneeze."

To the joke-teller, the sneeze was only minorly important. To the patient, the entire joke stopped at the vampire's sneeze. Nothing beyond the apparent discontinuity was retained by the victim. The patient would be unable to accurately repeat any part of the set-up beyond the sneeze, and in some cases won't even be able to repeat the punchline. The patient recieves almost no input whatsoever beyond the place where his/her personal irreality meter pegs.

When presented with an analogy that's not an identity, the patient will listen happily until the very first point at which the analogy veers from an identity. After that, the rest of the analogy may as well be spoken in Greek. It's simply not understood. I makes no sense at all to the patient. It's like some sort of allegorical dyslexia. The patient doesn't poke holes in examples and hypotheticals just to be a dick. The patient pokes those holes in an attempt to communicate his/her lack of understanding. Until the original vampire-sneeze-event (hereby called the VSE) is addressed, nothing can contine. Further, it's devilishly hard to address the VSE adaquately. You can't just say "Well, THIS vampire sneezes!", because that still makes no sense.

The biggest frustration in dealing with patients suffering from Vampire Sneeze Syndrome comes when the VSS patient is presented with a hypothetical. These are the people most likely to respond to any hypothetical with "But that could never happen". Lots of people do that just because they don't like the implications, or they want to be obnoxious. But a VSS patient truly have difficulty understanding anything beyond the percieved reality breakdown. They can't speak in hypotheticals without making a herculean effort. There is no hypothetical, there is no analogy, there is only reality.

Curiously enough, most VSS sufferers are quite capable of suspending disbelief. They enjoy movies, books, etc, and have no problem accepting the presence of a vampire in the joke. Perhaps this is simply the result of practice; our culture would be very hard to thrive in without the ability to suspend disbelief. But these suspensions only seem to occur in the presence of a strictly-defined rules system. If shown two movies on a similar subject with different sets of rules, many of the more severe VSS cases often seems to have a strong tendency to accuse the second movie of not following the first movie's rules, and thereby invalidating it (this made renting multiple movies a real delicate situation; they had to be in completely different genres, or she'd be complaining that Jason was "obviously violating" Freddy Krueger's rules, and would completely fail to enjoy, or even grasp, the rest of the movie).

I'm not trained in anything even remotely psychiatric, so there might actually be a real name for that sort of thing, but I see all the signs in these conversations with Goliath that I saw when arguing with my ex. I don't know how to fix it... what we eventually ended up doing was if I said something she didn't get, she'd say "Hon, I think a vampire sneezed. Can you repeat that?" If we found out a vampire did indeed sneeze (in the figurative sense, which, oddly enough, was an analogy she had no problems with), I'd just drop the subject entirely and try a different take on it a some later time (measured in days).

Bumble Bee Tuna

I think the problem tends to be that you get so caught up in trying to argue for your side that you never stop to think that you might be wrong. You debate to be right, not to debate. I feel like you somehow manage to reply to people's posts while simultaneously ignoring them- you just reply in the most adversarial manner possible and move on. I think you'd do much better if you really tried to understand your opponents' arguments.

This is only because you claimed to not know why, and I'm attempting to help and provide advice. I can identify the problem in both threads: in the Atheism/belief thread, SI conceded that he made a typo and was wrong very early in the game. But you got so caught up in the rebuttals that you didn't notice. In this thread, the point you are caught on is the omnipotence thing. Buffy's writers have complete power over everything in the Buffy universe. God is supposed to have complete power over everything in the real universe. Thus, an analogy. But you got hung up on it over the use of the word "omnipotence" where it doesn't really apply, even though to the rest of us, the meaning was clear. You also got hung up on this being an argument when it wasn't one. Which is symptomatic of your personality here- everything is a debate to you, plain discussion is impossible.

I think the analogy is a pretty good one. About the only thing I see that makes it a poor analogy is that the given Buffy inconsistency is very easy to reconcile compared to Biblical inconsistencies. Here's the analogy:

Buffy is a work of literature that contains inconsistencies that can be explained away by stretching logic.
The Bible is also a work of literature that contains inconsistencies that can be explained away by stretching logic.

The difference? Buffy is regarded as fictional, the Bible is regarded as true (by some).

Anyway I certainly don't hate you, I'm just trying to help you out.

-B

Mediancat

Possibly I could have chosen a better inconsistency, but I was at work and just used the first decent one I could think of.

A better one, maybe, is one that requires more explanation: In a certain episode Buffy and her allies need to make a trade with the bad guys: A big box o' evil things in exchange for Buffy's friend Willow's life. The way they do it is, one of Buffy's allies (Angel) carries the box over to the bad guys while Willow walks past him to relative safety.

When they pass, Willow is now more or less safe and Angel is a good five feet from the bad guys. This big box of evil things will be of tremendous help to the bad guys in furthering their evil plot.

And Angel had a good five-ten seconds to turn around and throw the box to Buffy or one of her other allies, but instead he simply hands it over to the bad guys.

Why?

A note, incidentally, on nitpicking reconciliation: A nit can be considered reconciled if it can be logically explained away -- and logical explanations do not include the characters acting out of character or being unusually stupid (unless, of course, that IS their character).

There are Biblical contradictions that can be explained away as easily as my original example; this makes them no less contradictions, of course.

In the case of the Buffyverse, while the existence of a miniature golf course can be readily reconciled in context, the meta-explanation is that the writers screwed up.

The same explanation would hold for the Bible. The writers screwed up. Which is no problem if one considers those writers to have been human . . . but IS if one considers it to be an unerring deity.

Rob aka Mediancat

Nowhere357

I just wanted to say that this is good generic advice that all of us should consider.

The_Unknown_Banana

I agree. Though I know I am somewhat guilty of it on occasion