wow, this thread was high-jacked. Back to the origional question of the post.

Some of my favorite Spiritual Books are:
When the lion roars: a primer for the unsuspecting mystic by stephen rosseti

The wounded healer by Henri Nouwen (also part of the L'arch community)

The irrisistable revolution; living as an ordinary radical by Shane Clairborn

Right now I am reading "the zen teachings of Jesus" and it is absolutely fascinating.

A great Humourous Religious Read for all the biblical literalist out there "The Year of living Bibically" is an absolute must read. The author is a non-practicing jew/agnostic that decides to live the bible as literal as possible (diet, governing laws ect.)It's pretty funny.

Ah, so it was all right to stone people and own slaves then!

And what of Isaiah?

It isn't sarcasm. It is a mirror. You don't believe in the bible as absolute truth any more than I do. You pick and choose what you want to believe. I'm glad that you are choosing to reject Timothy as being the cranky words of a misogynistic, less than perfect, non-divinely inspired person; so do I. I think that you are absolutely my equal and have every right to be heard in church or anywhere else. I don't think that you should have to be silent and obey your husband, your brothers (if any) or even your father once you reach the age of majority. If you obey your priest or minister, I hope that she has an equal chance of being a woman.

That's because my morality, like the morality of society in general, is better than it was 2000 years ago. It's because I (and many others) do not think that the bible is "inerrant truth" that you have the right to participate in this conversation. It was not at all a long time ago that you wouldn't have.

So how about it, Squiggles? Is Timothy right or wrong here? Was Jesus right to reject Mary's touch but not Thomas's? Should we take Corinthians seriously or "interpret" it away? Should LunaWolf obey her husband one day in all matters, or think for herself?

And what, precisely, makes Genesis any different? There is evidence aplenty that it is wrong. There is zero evidence -- and I do mean zero -- that it is right.

And I am so looking forward to any of you learning how radiometric dating works so we can have a rational discussion on the age of rocks. Be prepared, there will be a quiz.

rgb

OH MY GOSH.

You just love pushing people's buttons.

The whole point of my previous post was to say that DURING the Old Testament, things were different. Jesus died so that people DIDN'T have to stone people anymore to atone for their sins. And I most definitely am not about to pretend it never happened.

Whatever Timothy said, I am most definitely going to remain in this discussion. If only because your egotism and sarcasm causes me to really try and explain things.

Wow. I think I just got mad at you. You really do have a gift for sarcasm though.


Dang it. If y'all would excuse me, I am going to go and cool off.

Oh, and I almost missed your offhand remark that "stoning people should not be taken literally".

I'm sure that revelation is of great comfort to the many, many people that were stoned to death according to the rules of the Old Testament. And don't pretend that this never happened; Jesus stopped it from happening before his very eyes, if we are to believe that one story told in the bible is truth and not metaphor, contradiction, falsehood, or just plain silly.

rgb

Ah, I see. So when the bible says something that not even you can rationalize away, it is "interpreted" instead. In those cases it doesn't mean it, no matter how clear.

And if you think Jesus died so we can eat barbecue, well, in spite of the fact that I live in NC I'd have to respectfully disagree.

How do you feel about the "literal" and rather open endorsement of slavery? Is it truly God's word that it's just fine to own slaves? Did God set the price for slaves for all time at 30 shekels of silver? Is it truly peachy keen and God's will to beat slaves almost to death as long as you don't kill them, and to pay a modest weregild if you do? Is it God's perfect justice that children born to slaves should continue as slaves?

If Jesus' fairly clear (to me, at any rate) statements about prayer are just metaphor, then why do you pretend that your prayers have any influence on daily events? If they're not, then why is my interpretation wrong -- "I'll grant your prayers if I feel like it" sort of added on to the five or six direct quotes I cited.

If these quotes are just metaphor -- direct quotes of Jesus' own words -- how much more is metaphor? Perhaps Jesus didn't really go to a mountaintop to hang out with Moses (who was a pretty bloodthirsty guy who slaughtered children, gave over captured virgins to his men for purposes of soldierly rape, and who told them to go ahead and kill all the women who weren't virgins -- clearly a great moral leader) and God. Perhaps that was just a metaphor intended to convince us that Jesus was the Son of God.

And LunaWolf, what exactly do you think of these verses?

Corinthians chapter 14:

As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

My niece is a methodist minister, as it happens, and this attitude is far from gone in the modern church. And it is no accident, and this is not the only place.

1 Corinthians 11, for example, is odd:

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head--it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her wear a veil. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.) That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels.

I'm assuming that you are the glory of man, not your own glory, and that you wear a veil on your head. Or do you shave your head instead?

Nobody said the bible had to make sense, right? That would make it too simple to be good. Jesus couldn't just come out and say "Thou shalt not own slaves, nor abide those that do" or "Thou shalt treat all women as the equal of men". Instead, he quite clearly tells us to follow "the law", that is, the old testament rules. Of course -- he would have gotten nowhere at all if he'd said otherwise, no matter how wicked some of those rules happened to be.

Now interpret this away, or (if you prefer) keep silent, as I am a man.

1 Timothy chapter 2:

Also that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire but by good deeds, as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.

Please learn in silence and stop trying to teach me, and never ever braid your hair, wear any jewelry, or nice clothes.

Don't forget this one:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29

If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives.

So, as I understand this, it is perfectly OK for me to rape you as long as I pay your father fifty shekels of silver -- currently worth what, a few hundred dollars -- and furthermore that if I do we are married for life? Or is there an interpretation of this too? Maybe it doesn't really mean precisely what it says...

As soon as you give up literalism (as you will have to, sooner or later, whether you pick and choose just where and how you do so) then you're really done. The argument is over. Either the bible is inerrant truth for all time -- and don't forget:

Isaiah 40:8
1 Peter 1:24-25

or it contains metaphors, it contains contradictions, it contains falsehoods, it contains morally repugnant rules for living precisely as we might expect if it was written by ignorant desert tribesmen -- and I do mean "men" -- in a primitive, savage culture. You don't really need to read the bible to know that slavery is wrong (in spite of the fact that of course it was used, quite correctly, to justify slavery repeatedly over thousands of years). You don't really need to read the bible to know that women are equal to men in every sense that should matter to God -- a fact that seems to have eluded Jesus:

John 20:17 Jesus says to Mary: "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father," but just a few verses later it's just fine for Thomas to touch him. Mary, unclean. Thomas, clean. Right.

Matthew 25:1 Jesus says: "At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom."

That would be singular bridegroom. So not only could you be raped and bought to wife for 50 shekels of inflation proof silver (true for all time) but you could end up just one of at least ten wives before Jesus gets upset. Or else this is a very, very odd metaphor as well as being totally sexist.

Now, I'm certain that you will find some way of rationalizing, interpreting all this away. But why do we have to? Why isn't the bible crystal clear? Why doesn't Jesus ever say "Slavery is horrible, owners of slaves will be consigned to the fiery pit!" instead of stating that everybody goes to the pit unless they perform certain rituals that have nothing to do, ever, anywhere, with putting aside slavery. The bible does not have one single explicit statement that slavery is wrong, but it has plenty that not only state that is it perfectly all right but give strict rules regulating it, none of which seriously protect the slave.

A fifteen year old female -- not even an adult human in our culture -- or male human, for that matter -- could do a better job of writing down a moral system than this. Not only because they could add a few commandments that somehow got missed the first time, like "thou shalt not own slaves" and "women are the equals of men", but because they could actually write more clearly.

After all, I'm writing these rebuttals clearly enough, I trust. Language is quite easy to use to convey even subtle ideas accurately. Even if one wishes to use metaphor to explain something -- a dangerous practice as any teacher knows -- it helps tremendously to first state the point clearly and in plain language.

So, LunaWolf, are you planning to retire from the conversation because it is God's clearly expressed will that you stifle yourself before all men for all time, or is it possible that Timothy, that Corinthians might be wrong?

Just curious, as always.

rgb

I knew he was going to say something like that. No, I did not mean like Genesis, nor did Squiggles. I meant that SOME things, like, say stoning people, are not to be taken literally. Not just because such a thing is horrible and 'outdated' like I am sure you will mention. But because Jesus got rid of the 'need' for such punishment when He died on the cross. A man had to pay for all men's sins so they wouldn't have to keep sacrificing and abiding by 'don't eat unclean meat' rules, so there would be nothing permanently standing before them and God. And pay for our sins He did.

Ah, you mean like Genesis. I absolutely agree.

rgb

Finally! I'm glad you pointed that out, LunaWolf. The Bible is not meant to be taken 100% literally. This is what many "contradictions" of the Bible are based on: literal interpretation.

When it says if we have the faith of a mustard seed we can move mountains, it means obstacles in our lives, not necessarily real mountains. Figurative mountains. Like when we are trying to go after something, or we are facing trials, and there is a big 'mountain' in front of us, preventing us from reaching that goal/what God has for us. We can't see the big picture because all we see is that gigantic mountain. And with faith, if we REALLY have faith, that mountain can be moved.

And as I've said in the past, that much I agree with, except that I do not believe in any variant of "original sin". Nor do I believe that people are originally sinful, particularly sinful, sinful at every moment, sinful in all of their thoughts, in constant need of forgiveness. Nor do I believe that God is in any way petty.

One can question whether or not God exists at all or is a figment of our imagination. No evidence can serve to prove or disprove the existence of God, only of a God that we expect to behave in some way like ourselves, like an anthropomorphic reflection of our own egos. We have only one piece of evidence; the evidence of our own entirely unexpected existences, infinitely unlikely (precisely infinitely unlikely) but here nevertheless, the infinitely unlikely point on the dartboard, a set of measure zero in the space of all possible things that is nevertheless being measured, weighed, experienced -- by each of us, alone, peering out through the dark glass of our senses.

Are we alone, or are we not? In some sense that is another way of framing the ultimate question, and no evidence can answer it, only faith, only the way we have of looking at our selves. And by alone, I mean really alone -- are you really there? Is anything? Is anyone?

If, however, we're going to treat this question with the seriousness it deserves, we cannot rely on words in old books! We must use our reason. Instead of projecting not only man, but a particularly primitive and violent tribal mankind from the world that existed thousands of years ago, a world where slavery and conquest and slaughter were the order of the day's business, instead of envisioning God as man sent to accept the responsibility for uplifting the human species, it is time to recognize that with God or without God, it is our own responsibility to do that uplifting, and we will never do it on the backs of old myths or while we believe in "magic" that will come to the rescue, in an ability to wish for something and make it so without using our heads and our hands to make it so.

Faith does not move mountains. Humans do. I have driven up the West Virginia turnpike many times and seen where mountains were in fact moved, because they were in the way of human purpose. Faith does not heal the sick. Humans do, humans that devote their lives to the task, who use every bit of the reason God may or may not have given them by means of a harsh but necessary evolution to accomplish it. God does not stop us from warring, from murdering one another, but humans -- far too few humans -- would like to. We cannot do it divided by religion, by greed, by unreason. Only reason will guide us, a reason courageous enough to make tough decisions, a reason brave enough to face the facts of our own existences without the crutch of a "savior" that will do for us that which we do not really want to do for ourselves.

There is, I will freely admit, wisdom in the bible, but it is (and I'm sorry about this, but it is true) relatively rare and what wisdom is there is straightforward, easily separated from the smoke and mirrors of miracles designed to prove divine origin when they really suggest rather the opposite to the active mind. There is as much or more wisdom in the Upanishads, and they have a lot of bullshit mixed in as well. There is wisdom in the Koran. There is more wisdom, more to be learned about humans and our place in the world from Darwin than there is in all three put together.

From Darwin we learn that the world does not love us. Sharks eat us because they are hungry and we look like food. Bacteria kill us because that's just what they do, if we are careless and let them. We kill each other. Tornados and hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis and just plain accidents kill us casually and without a thought. Not even our births are immaculate -- our genes shuffle and rearrange in the dance of reproduction, producing genius and idiocy, great athletes and humans too weak and handicapped to stand. Bad luck does not respect religion, ignores prayer; at most prayer and meditation on God gives us the strength to endure it, but Darwin shows us its purpose, the upward spiral.

We are not finished beings. We never fell from grace, and the ills of the world are not a curse but a blessing; they are the very tool God uses to shape us and change us, over time, into something that is ever better than that which came before. However, we have, as a species, advanced to where we are ourselves the leading edge of the blade that cuts away all the wood that doesn't look like an elephant. We must take charge and shape our own destiny. If we don't, evolution will happen anyway -- it is a process that just happens and is almost impossible to oppose. We could wipe out the human species, and as long as single celled life forms remained alive on the planet it would just start again, and maybe "get it right" the second time. If there is anything such as "right".

I personally would like us to avoid that. If we put aside the foolishness of the bible, of the koran, of the idea that God cares to be "worshipped" like some sort of oversized image of ourselves, as we would like to be worshipped, if we look at the world with reason and compassion and put aside the "sin" of unreason and youth and take charge of our own human destiny, perhaps -- just perhaps, because the world itself may ever betray us and the sun itself or the volcano that smolders under yellowstone or an unseen asteroid could wipe us out to the last human tomorrow -- we can change ourselves into something better, over time.

Who knows? Maybe that's what Jesus had in mind when he said that those who follow would exceed his own works, long after he was dead? If Jesus was a very smart man for his time, perhaps he had a small bit of insight into what was to come, some knowledge that one day mankind would, in actual fact, become more moral, more ethical, wiser, than even he. That would be true wisdom; the knowledge that change never stops, that we always grow, always learn, that our knowledge and compassion can always become greater, but only if we face the universe in a search for what we can best believe, best in an objective sense supported by the highest order of reason we have yet been able to conceive.

Anything less is sheer laziness, one human at a time.

So sure, I choose to believe in the God answer to the one unanswerable question where an atheist might choose not to believe and where both of us are really agnostic in that our belief or disbelief are necessarily disconnected from real evidence. One can imagine it all being true either way. It doesn't matter, though, because either the atheist and the theist, the agnostic deist, discover how to make reason and compassion work together or else we have a very real chance of being a cruel blade, one that will carve out the next generation in our physical and spiritual evolution in blood and horror instead of wisdom and compassion.

Ultimately, this is quite close to the message of Buddha alone of all the philosophers of old, and Buddha was still trapped by a lack of knowledge, fooled into focussing everything on the pain, not brave enough to accept the pain as the price of life itself and give life a purpose anyway. We must move beyond even the Buddha. He himself, I suspect, would have been sadly amused by any thought that his words were the last words. Any words at all are just the beginning, forever.

rgb

Forgive me ... now that I have had more time to reflect on the Biblical passage cited and a little sleep, I think I missed the mark on my interpretation. If you will allow me a second attempt?

Okay ... starting with the fig tree that bears no fruit. It is symbolic of our fate (death) if we also fail to bear spiritual fruit. The mustard seed is our faith and trust in God that he may remove any obstacle (the mountain ... which is symbolic of our sin) should we but ask for forgiveness; but only so much as we forgive others. The two themes here are trust/faith in God and forgiveness.

rgb said: Obviously we disagree at a very fundamental level about the meaning of belief and knowledge as words, but as is usually the case in debates of this sort, the confusion is semantic and not fundamental.

Well ... yes. I DID say that it was a silly debate and that my objection was semantic :)

Now, regarding my being wrong about what the bible says, what can I do but quote (just to give you the chance to interpret away the meaning, of course, but I'm sure Jesus had an inscrutable purpose in saying one thing an meaning another -- it happens all over the bible, after all):

Matthew 21:21

I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

Mark 11:24

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

I am sure you would agree that context is important yes? After all, I believe Mr Ford's customers were promised that they could get any colour they wanted - so long as it's black?

Each chapter has a purpose ... or theme(s). Each verse builds upon that theme. There are actually two themes of this chapter. A generally attack on the religious elites (reflected in cursing the fig tree which bears no fruit is one). Faith or trust in God no matter the obstacles is the other. This is reinforced with the statement about the mountain and the mustard seed. The seed is an overloaded symbol, representing both the size AND the potential of faith (as properly nourished it becomes a sizable plant whose roots can break apart stone if they find a crack). It is a exhortation not to lose faith when faced with an insurmountable obstacle ... such as the rapidly approaching crucification. God will help you through it.

Why isn't the bible clear? After all, God supposedly wrote it (or directly inspired humans to write it). Is God incapable of inspiring humans to write clearly, to write what is actually meant?

Don't know ... perhaps we learn better when we work it all out for ourselves. A fair number of mystic traditions hold this as true. Perhaps we can discover new meaning as we grow spiritually. This is actually hinted at with Jesus' discussion about divorce. Perhaps it was never meant to be unchanging canon as opposed to each generation and/or society making these stories their own (which is exactly what happened to the earlier text). Does that mean it is all worthless? Can you not learn something from even a flawed text? Is the library known as the Bible discarded as entirely erroneous because some monk added a commentary that was later synchronized with the original? Or an early disciple re-framed the story to emphasize a different part/concept?

Hmmmm, how to respond and not offend you (as I do like you and don't want to offend you). If a fanatic is one end of a spectrum, I agree. However, it is not possible to be a strict believer (dangerous word, "strict") and not have beliefs that collide somewhere with evidence, or that don't require interpreting not just a piece of text here or there but whole blocks of text (like the ones above) as not meaning what they say.

I hope I am not so easily offended; but, thank you for the consideration.

I would say that I have a very strict or narrow interpretation of the Bible. It is, for the most part, comprised of stories that are designed to illustrate some moral or sacred element to the reader. It makes full use of the literary devices common to the time and place of creation as well as specific esoteric symbols common to the expected audience ... which is NOT me. If I am to properly interpret the intended message, I need to understand the complete context in which it was originally formed and eventually redacted. This requires a scholastic effort on my part that is very similar to our approach to science (interpret, challenge, refine) ... refactoring what I believe to be the message as I obtain new information. When my interpretation 'collides' with established evidence, I am perfectly willing to change my interpretation ... MOST of the assertions in the Bible are not required to support my faith, so I don't care whether or not they are literally true. I generally do NOT entertain multiple interpretations at the same time, so I technically satisfy the definition of a strict or narrow belief yes? And because I am open to changing that belief, I am not a fanatic?

The bible has to stop being a straightforward book of truth and turn into some sort of "code", where things don't mean what they appear to mean, because if they did, they'd violate our direct experience. This is being irrational according to the same general formula as the fanatic, it is just milder and is blessed by a certain degree of humility and doubt.

Not really ... in fact, I believe you have already expounded upon the association of language and symbols or code. Religious experience is all about using such [overloaded] symbols to describe the indescribable or the sacred experience or transcending the human condition. In just about every tradition I have looked at to date, you get into trouble when you constrain yourself to the obvious :)

"Of course not. You just wrote down a piece of circular reasoning. You say that you don't understand Revelation.

Now you're explaining something I'd been wondering about. Your pastor taught you not to think. Ever. Explains a lot."

First of all, I didn't say that I didn't understand Revelation, I said that I found it hard to understand.

Next of all (lol), my pastor certainly didn't teach me not to think. In fact, the truth in opposite. He taught me to think for myself. To be honest with you, for the vast majority (over 90%) of what I've been saying, I've said it with no other source than the Bible. I haven't run to my pastor after every question is raised. I went back to the Scriptures (through which God reveals Himself to us) to think over what was said and, as Peter says, prepare a defense for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Kristjan,

Obviously we disagree at a very fundamental level about the meaning of belief and knowledge as words, but as is usually the case in debates of this sort, the confusion is semantic and not fundamental. If you want to assert that I have a belief that it will not rain next Tuesday that is "weakly supported by knowledge" to support it, and I want to assert that I think there is a (say) 80% chance it won't rain on Tuesday and that these are somehow different, our conversation will rapidly take on a surreal cast.

I think that we agree that in both cases I'm not terribly sure that it won't rain, where I'm pretty darned sure it won't rain outside in the next five minutes, and could still be wrong in both cases. If you consider my being pretty darned sure (but not certain) to be "belief" instead of "knowledge" or "degree of belief" that's fine, just remember that there is an algebra worked out to describe the process of knowledge OR belief that I'm describing, where the beauty of algebra is it gets rid of all those annoying and ambiguous words.

Now, regarding my being wrong about what the bible says, what can I do but quote (just to give you the chance to interpret away the meaning, of course, but I'm sure Jesus had an inscrutable purpose in saying one thing an meaning another -- it happens all over the bible, after all):

Matthew 7:7

Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Matthew 17:20

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

Matthew 21:21:

I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

Mark 11:24:

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

John chapter 14, verses 12 through 14

"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.

Matthew 18:19

Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

Now, it's kind of silly of me, I know, but it seems to me that Jesus is asserting that whatever you ask in my name, I will do it.

Not whatever you ask in my name, I will do it if I feel like it, if it doesn't contradict nature in any way, as long as it never violates the probabilistic distribution of outcomes in any way that favors the praying person or the objects of the prayer. And oh, yeah, I was kidding about the mountain.

Of course it is a matter of simple empirical truth that one cannot move mountains with prayer (although people move mountains without it), one cannot heal the sick with prayer (at any rate detectably different from the rate sick people are healed without the prayer), one cannot ever heal an amputee or a person with Down's syndrome or do anything else that egregiously violates the laws of chance and probability or science. So I can understand why these verses will require a bit of "interpretation".

So much so that one does have to ask -- why bother "believing in the bible" in the first place? Why isn't the bible clear? After all, God supposedly wrote it (or directly inspired humans to write it). Is God incapable of inspiring humans to write clearly, to write what is actually meant?

Just curious.

And yes, what I'm describing -- a person who holds fast to a belief in the face of all evidence, who refuses to even look the contradictory evidence in the eye, who will invent the most comical distortions of meaning to avoid having to confront the numerous contradictions in their beliefs is indeed a fanatic. And fanatics are dangerous. Yep, you got it in one try.

Now, we can just go down the list of participants in this discussion who have beliefs that they are holding onto in the face of all evidence to the contrary (and I don't, actually, include you in that list) and mark them off as fanatics, and therefore dangerous. We can mark off reasons -- a number of very good reasons -- why they are dangerous not just to themselves but to others. People who believe that prayer can heal often avoid medical treatment, or avoid taking their children for medical treatment. People who think the world is 6000 years old can't possibly understand the issues associated with climate change and vote or act intelligently because analyzing the problem correctly requires looking at data over millions of years, not just the last 6000, and if they look at the data from the last 6000 they cannot help but notice that the data keeps on going back and hence have reason to disbelieve the whole thing. People who don't believe in evolution can't possibly participate intelligently in public policy debates on the possibility of emerging diseases (new species), evolution of resistance in existing species, conservation or ecology. They can't manage to make informed decisions on stem cell research and so much more. Every decision they make is colored by belief in a fantasy.

And I still don't know what they do about the flat earth problem, as they won't address it. How can they? If they acknowledge the earth is round, they acknowledge the bible is incorrect, and if it is incorrect anywhere, it is no longer the divinely inspired of God, at least for them -- it is dubious everywhere.

As for your assertion:

What I am maintaining is that it is possible to be a true (aka strict) believer and NOT be a fanatic, or even a literalist, as determined by analysis of the terms.

Hmmmm, how to respond and not offend you (as I do like you and don't want to offend you). If a fanatic is one end of a spectrum, I agree. However, it is not possible to be a strict believer (dangerous word, "strict") and not have beliefs that collide somewhere with evidence, or that don't require interpreting not just a piece of text here or there but whole blocks of text (like the ones above) as not meaning what they say.

The bible has to stop being a straightforward book of truth and turn into some sort of "code", where things don't mean what they appear to mean, because if they did, they'd violate our direct experience. This is being irrational according to the same general formula as the fanatic, it is just milder and is blessed by a certain degree of humility and doubt.

And, of course, you do have to believe in the miracles, the trinity, the resurrection. Don't you? And where and how do you pick and choose what to believe of the ethics, of the morals, of the supposed "prophecies" of the old testament, given that what used to be -- for 1900 years -- the core motivation for "salvation" disappears with the garden of Eden? If you're going to use a non-biblical sense of right and wrong to decide what to believe and what not to believe in the bible, why bother using the bible at all?

rgb

rgb said: Kristjan, I don't see what is incongruous about having belief expressed as a probability. We do it all the time. As I said, the actual algebra of belief IS the algebra of probability, when one attempts to quantify belief in terms of "more" or "less", that is, put it on an ordinal scale. The axioms of Cox are pretty much that belief can be ordinal, and that evidence causes belief to increase or decrease relative to the degree of belief before looking at the new evidence.

No ... we don't. In terms of belief, we hold that something is either true or we don't believe it. The strength of that belief has nothing to do with probability and everything to do with the justification needed to transform that belief into knowledge.

If you asked me if I believe that it will rain next Tuesday, I'd say "probably not". That is because it doesn't rain more often than it rains (from prior evidence), and it rains rather less than usual in May in NC (from prior evidence). However this year things are unusually wet (from local prior evidence) but not, I think, enough to make rain likely on any day that far into the future. Now wait. I keep a window open on wunderground.com in this very browser, so I click it. Tuesday is out there at the edge of its displayed prediction, and it is supposed to be clear. My experience is that that far out, its prediction isn't THAT reliable, but since the "average" prediction was already "no rain", it increases my degree of belief that it will not rain next Tuesday. I wouldn't be surprised if it DID rain, though -- we're talking about the weather after all.

Again ... Your belief here is actually No ... And the justification of that belief is weak ... In other words, you are very much open to changing your belief in response to any change within your justification (or new evidence). This is not assigning a probability to a belief; it is using probability as a justification.

You are confusing the binary nature of a true/false assertion -- after all, it either will or will not rain in a 24 hour period at my house's location in the city of Durham -- with the range of possible degrees of belief.

I don't think so ... There are in fact limited definitions of what is true:
1) Steadfast; Honest ... Does not apply in this context
2) Real; Ideal; Not Assumed; Consistent ... This is a binary definition
3) [Arche]-Typical ... This is a binary definition
4) Legitimate ... Does not apply in this context
5) Accurate ... This is a binary definition
6) Aligned to an axis ... Does not apply in this context
7) Logically required ... This is a binary definition
8) Narrow or Strict ... Does not apply in this context
9) Without Error ... This is a binary definition
If I believe that it will rain next Tuesday, then I hold true (def #5) the statement that 'it will rain next Tuesday.' Whether or not it DOES rain next Tuesday is irrelevant to my belief. If I state that it will 'probably' rain next Tuesday, I am justifying my belief using 'prior evidence' as you so kindly pointed out. This represents knowledge ... Not belief. You are confusing the strength of a belief (the ability to effectively hold it) with the probability that a belief is factually true or false ... The later is NOT required for belief and in fact is inconsistent from the viewpoint of the believer. The believer holds that some concept is true ... If said concept is proven false, then the belief is changed to reflect the 'anti-concept' as true.

This is not at all irrelevant to this discussion. Let us suppose, for example, that the bible says that it will rain next Tuesday. This is not an idle assertion. The bible says -- in multiple places -- that if one prays for pretty much anything, one's prayers will be answered and you'll get what you want. So if I pray for rain next Tuesday, according to the bible it should rain.

Ahh ... No ... The Bible does not say that. Taken in context, it says that you will get what you need, not what you want. Of course the final arbiter of that need is God. Convenient no?

Now you tell me, if I do pray for rain next Tuesday, just how should my degree of belief in the probable weather for that day change?

Simple ... You either believe it will rain because you believe your prayer will be answered in the affirmative ... Or you don't. This is true of any outcome where you exercise belief.

Would you go out and drop your health insurance and save the money? Do you think that the insurance company should have special rates for "Christians who pray for good health" because there is a measurable difference in cancer rates for Christians and non-Christians?

Now you are just being silly ...

A true believer in the BI assertion behaves very differently. They assign a degree of belief of one (true beyond any doubt) to this assertion prior to looking at the evidence, and do not permit evidence to alter their degree of belief no matter what the evidence is. This requires them to participate in incredible distortions of meaning and common sense.

What you are describing is the definition of a fanatic ... What I am maintaining is that it is possible to be a true (aka strict) believer and NOT be a fanatic, or even a literalist, as determined by analysis of the terms. Because of the inherent ambiguity of the phrase, miscommunication is more likely and you would be better served to pick a more descriptive phrase.

Kristjan, I don't see what is incongruous about having belief expressed as a probability. We do it all the time. As I said, the actual algebra of belief IS the algebra of probability, when one attempts to quantify belief in terms of "more" or "less", that is, put it on an ordinal scale. The axioms of Cox are pretty much that belief can be ordinal, and that evidence causes belief to increase or decrease relative to the degree of belief before looking at the new evidence.

If you asked me if I believe that it will rain next Tuesday, I'd say "probably not". That is because it doesn't rain more often than it rains (from prior evidence), and it rains rather less than usual in May in NC (from prior evidence). However this year things are unusually wet (from local prior evidence) but not, I think, enough to make rain likely on any day that far into the future.

Now wait. I keep a window open on wunderground.com in this very browser, so I click it. Tuesday is out there at the edge of its displayed prediction, and it is supposed to be clear. My experience is that that far out, its prediction isn't THAT reliable, but since the "average" prediction was already "no rain", it increases my degree of belief that it will not rain next Tuesday. I wouldn't be surprised if it DID rain, though -- we're talking about the weather after all.

As time passes, wunderground's predictions will include evidence from local patterns, and they'll get more and more reliable. By Monday, for example, they'll be very accurate. If the prediction for Tuesday is fair weather by Monday night, my belief that it will not rain will become very strong indeed. And could still prove wrong.

You are confusing the binary nature of a true/false assertion -- after all, it either will or will not rain in a 24 hour period at my house's location in the city of Durham -- with the range of possible degrees of belief.

This is not at all irrelevant to this discussion. Let us suppose, for example, that the bible says that it will rain next Tuesday. This is not an idle assertion. The bible says -- in multiple places -- that if one prays for pretty much anything, one's prayers will be answered and you'll get what you want. So if I pray for rain next Tuesday, according to the bible it should rain.

Now you tell me, if I do pray for rain next Tuesday, just how should my degree of belief in the probable weather for that day change?

This is an important question. In fact, pick any outcome you desire, good, bad, indifferent. I don't doubt that you would rather not be diagnosed with cancer the next time you go to the doctor. If you think about it at all, you probably do so with a small prayer -- "God, please don't let me be diagnosed with cancer next time I go to the doctor." So, just how much do you think that prayer alters your probability of being diagnosed with cancer compared to a general population of believers and non-believers? Would you go out and drop your health insurance and save the money? Do you think that the insurance company should have special rates for "Christians who pray for good health" because there is a measurable difference in cancer rates for Christians and non-Christians?

Now, let's return to the BI (Biblical Inerrancy) crowd: Tommy, Squiggles, Katie, et. al. The bible says right there in black and white that if one prays for pretty much anything, one will get it. Of course this isn't true, and if one does anything like an experiment to see if it is true or to see if prayer affects outcomes in a statistically discernible way, one gets a null result (no correlation between prayer and outcome observed). And yes, this sort of thing has been studied all the time, is being studied, will be studied, and never produces a consistent positive effect under controlled (e.g. double blind, prespecified target) circumstances.

They all have health insurance too, because they know perfectly well that praying for good health won't affect the probability of having bad health, no matter how fervently it is done, because God does not, in fact, break the laws of the Universe for their convenience even if they ask nicely. The point is that "true belief" (and the negative, dangerous thing associated with it) is when they disconnect this sort of analysis from the assignment of their degree of belief in a proposition.

The process works like the following:

a) BI assertion: The bible is 100% true. The bible says in all sorts of places that it is the inspired word of God and not only is true, but is true for all time. Every word in Leviticus (including those that permit slavery and beating a slave almost to death, but that's another story) were true then and are still true.

b) A rational person, one who uses reason instead of unreason to determine truth, might when first considering this proposition start out in a state of neutral belief -- maybe it is true, maybe it is not true. The rational, sane thing to do to alter this degree of belief is to look at evidence and increase or decrease it based on what we discover.

c) If we examine the bible, we discover that it says that the world is roughly 6000 years old. It says that the world is disk shaped -- flat and with a circular border. It has a topology that permits the whole thing to be seen from the top of a very high mountain. This disk sits on a deep ocean of water -- in fact, this deep ocean of water preceded creation altogether as the spirit of God moved over this water before the disk shaped earth was created, before there was even light. The sun and the moon go around the earth, the moon glows with its own light rather than reflecting the light of the sun, the heavens are a solid bowl hung with tiny lamps that can move around and do things like hover over a stable and that can be shaken down by earthquakes and that foretell the future (except elsewhere where it is stated that they do not foretell the future, but again, another story).

Now, any child knows that every single thing listed in c) is false. Even Katie probably thinks that it would be lovely to take a trip to the holy land and walk where Jesus walked etc, but alas, it is on the other side of our roughly spherical planet and cannot be seen from where she is no matter how high a mountain she climbs. There is no "deep" that holds up the land, the stars are not tiny lights that move, and they cannot be shaken down by earthquakes no matter how strong. Water did not exist before light -- water is in fact a molecule held together by forces that are light, and light existed long before anything vaguely resembling a single water molecule came into being in the big bang that occurred roughly 13.5 billion years ago. The earth goes around the sun, the moon goes around the earth, and the sun moves not around the earth but around the center of mass of the galaxy, which itself moves.

A reasonable person would take these observations, these things that we have all come to believe quite strongly (I myself have traveled all the way around the earth some four times) and then increase or decrease one's degree of belief in the BI assertion accordingly. That is what reason is.

A true believer in the BI assertion behaves very differently. They assign a degree of belief of one (true beyond any doubt) to this assertion prior to looking at the evidence, and do not permit evidence to alter their degree of belief no matter what the evidence is. This requires them to participate in incredible distortions of meaning and common sense. For example, Daniel will no doubt come up with some hermeneutic doublespeak about how slavery was OK then but not now, in spite of the fact that that directly contradicts another part of the bible that says that in fact what was true then must be true now, and ignore the flat earth problem altogether. All because they cannot permit themselves to just say: "the BI assertion is false".

rgb

rgb said: A number of things come out of this analysis. One is that "true belief" in any hypothesis regarding the real world can be precisely defined. It is the assignment of a probability to any proposition in the chain of propositions that make up the interconnected network of human knowledge that are vastly higher than are warranted, so high that they distort the entire network and force whole segments of it into contradiction (where even contradiction is not sharp, true, but it doesn't matter).

Well ... I'm going to take a more semantic approach to this debate :)

The general definition of belief is to hold some concept, premise, etc. as true. Note that belief (or holding something as true) is quite independent of whether or not the premise actually is true; belief is entirely based upon perception (or the ability of a person or subject to assert a proposition).

"I am a true believer" is functionally equivalent to saying "My belief is true." This statement is completely redundant, since you are merely saying that you perceive the concept that you hold as true to be true. Likewise the statement that "My belief is false" is problematic because it is mutually exclusive (oxymoron). In this context, True is a binary value ... Either your concept is true (correct) or it is false (error). It is incongruous to label your belief as 60% true; sorta like a little bit pregnant.

This is quite different from the statement "He is a true believer." In this context, you have introduced a second perspective ... In this case, it is the speaker's perception we must examine; either the speaker is asserting his opinion that the believer's belief is true ... OR he has used some mechanism (aka sarcasm) to imply the opposite. I don't see any of the mechanisms (such as quotations marks) in this label that are commonly used to denote sarcasm; so the former concept is more likely to apply. Fortunately in this context (apart from the believer) we can expand the definition of true to see what best fits; unfortunately that means we need further amplification in order to select the correct definition. Fortunately you have further defined it as somebody who believes that the Bible is inerrant ... Although even that does not support your argument that such people are actually dangerous; most of the Christian sects take the view that the Bible is without error when interpreted within a specific context, and I find it difficult to accept the charge that we are all so crazy as that. Despite your assertion that true believers are dangerous, you further refine your definition to those who hold a literal interpretation of the Bible ... I think you would be hard pressed to find somebody who did that for the entire text ... So either you are talking about a very small population or you are still too ambiguous with your description to provide an accurate selection criteria. This makes it difficult to adequately communicate what you mean by using the phrase 'True Believer.'

Finally ... Your argument makes a spectacular leap from quantifying knowledge to quantifying belief. Philosophically speaking ... Knowledge is defined as 'justified true belief.' In other words, the believer must have some rationale to support his belief (justified) that is accepted as true by somebody else (see above). Your assignment of probabilities to any given concept or fact is no more then the required justification to make your belief actual knowledge, that does not mean that you may transfer those probabilities to your belief. In fact, it is unlikely that you would 'hold as true' a given concept with an infinitesimally small probability of being correct and is therefore not appropriately identified as a belief. You either believe something or you don't. If you have a strong belief, then it is difficult to change it ... If you have a weak belief, it is much easier to challenge it ... That doesn't equate to a partial belief.

Of course not. You just wrote down a piece of circular reasoning. You say that you don't understand Revelation. Well, of course I can understand that -- it is raving lunacy. If you open up the bible to random places and read, chances are ten to one that you'll find it. You'll learn that it is God's word that it is OK to amputate a woman's hand if she helps her husband in a fight and grabs her husband's foe by the cojones.

You'll find that women should shut up in church. Says it, right there. Unambiguously. Says elsewhere that women should pretty much shut up and do exactly what their husbands tell them, that slavery was peachy, that it was a simply great to go around slaughtering women and children as long as they were your enemies.

Now you're explaining something I'd been wondering about. Your pastor taught you not to think. Ever. Explains a lot.

rgb

Dear Robert:

"And Tommy, this is a real-world example of what I mean when I say that true believers are dangerous. You say that you have a hard time with Revelations. Why? Isn't it yet another part of the inerrant bible? Aren't you willing to believe what you are told about it by an "authority" like Hagee? If not, why not? Could it be because somewhere in there you have a moral sense and ability to think critically outside of authority?"

Okay, let me tackle the first question first, since you're all about reason and logic :)

Why do I have a hard time with Revelation? Well, because there is a ton of imagery and symbolism in the book. The symbols are so complex, and most can have various meanings. And yes, it is a part of the inerrant Bible. However, not all parts of the inerrant Bible are the same, and thus cannot be treated the same. Take, for instance, the book of Proverbs and Romans. Proverbs (as I'm sure you can guess) is all proverbs, written down in verse and compiled in a logical sequence. Romans is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the Christians in (where else?) Rome. We can't treat both of these books equally, because they're not in the same format nor are their audiences the same.

"Aren't you willing to believe what you are told about it by an "authority" like Hagee?" Actually, this is something that I (at first, at least) had a hard time with. However, I was blessed with an amazing pastor, who taught me to evaluate everything through the Word of God. Whether it was something I heard at school, something that I was taught, whatever. He taught me to go back to the Word of God (which is the sole authority on doctrine) and evaluate what I was being taught, to make sure it was Biblical. Does that answer your quesiton?

With that clearly explained (I hope) we can finally address True Belief.

According to the algebra developed from first principles (simple axioms indeed concerning degree of belief and "evidence") by Cox and Jaynes, the algebra of probability, and according to arguments advanced (correctly) by David Hume four hundred or so years ago, we know nothing (well, almost nothing) at the level of 1, absolute truth. The only piece of knowledge I possess at this level is that I am existing, in the instant. Even my memories of five minutes ago are plausibly false, imperfect, and are losing information resolution as I sit here as I remember at most the important things. I don't even remember what I myself wrote up above verbatim, only generally. I have to make assumptions (such as the world I seem to be perceiving is really there) to begin to analyze it and assess my knowledge of it.

Everything that I've written so far is "true" -- not as a matter of belief, but in a mathematical sense. Given only the bootstrapping of a language and associated ontology to frame it in, it is all basically mathematics that holds whenever a big systems (Universe) is partitioned into two subsystems (e.g. "Self" and "Everything Else"). An information theoretic analysis rapidly demonstrates that knowledge of Self or knowledge of Everything Else alone does not suffice to predict any rule based differential process involving the fully coupled system unless the two subsystems are fully decoupled and never exchange information or do so only in trivial ways that basically never happen in any sufficiently complex system (they have zero measure, if you know what that means).

Now here's the problem. "Reason", as described above (for this is the theory of reason) doesn't require belief, it is the algebra of belief. It is a metaaxiomatic construct -- it (and a few other things like compliance with the usual meta-axioms of reason, the laws of thought, when formulating assertions within the theory so we don't assert A and not A and thereby find it possible to prove any assertion as a theorem) regulates our choice of axioms.

The axioms it admits for use in the real world are "odd" -- they are not assertions of truth or falsehood as are the propositions of mathematics, They are assertions of a best guess, an estimate of truth or falsehood. They are numbers on a scale from 0 to 1 not including the end points. In fact, they are almost always best expressed on a sigmoidal scale such that -infinity is 0, +infinity is 1, and 0 is 1/2, perfect uncertainty, "I don't know". On such a scale a two might represent a high degree of certainty -- say 0.99 -- where -2 might represent 0.01 -- a high degree of certainty that the proposition is false. Our belief in the general universality of Newton's law of gravitation on the macro scale might be very high -- 10, or 30. Our belief that "gravity" is caused by invisible fairies might be very low, -10 or -30, but neither one can ever be infinite; we can never be certain that the theory is correct because we have finite evidence, because (just like the invention of a DNA test changes everything) one day we might invent a fairy detector that changes everything, we might invent antigravity, we might discover a better theory that supercedes it while preserving all its good qualities.

The real world axioms that have any sort of positive degree of belief all have the additional property that they must be falsifiable. You can now see why they must be falsifiable. If they are not, they are completely disconnected from the web of interconnected plausible beliefs. Invisible fairies are an excellent example, as they are invisible. Nobody can ever, ever say that they are definitely not there, nothing we observe can contradict the hypothesis, none of my existing knowledge can help me assign this hypothesis a meaningful probability. The best I can do is add this particular hypothesis to the enormous pile of non-falsifiable hypotheses, assign each of them a probability of (1-(the sum of the plausible hypothesis probabilities))/(their number as it tends to infinity) which asymptotically approaches zero.

I'm hoping this is clear. In the absence of prior knowledge, knowledge that is connected by a chain of joint probability distributions to the proposition in question, the best assignment of probability is equal weights to all POSSIBILITIES, and in matters of association -- we are proposing a theory of causation here, it is not a given -- there are basically always an infinite number of ways you can imagine an association to come about.

A number of things come out of this analysis. One is that "true belief" in any hypothesis regarding the real world can be precisely defined. It is the assignment of a probability to any proposition in the chain of propositions that make up the interconnected network of human knowledge that are vastly higher than are warranted, so high that they distort the entire network and force whole segments of it into contradiction (where even contradiction is not sharp, true, but it doesn't matter). If I choose to believe that gravity is caused by fairies and could at any moment change according to their fairy psychology, I have to invent elaborate schemes of fairy psychology to explain why things so far work out the way they do. I have to interpret earth's position around the sun in terms of the fairies' desire to keep us warm, but not too warm, and the position and motion of the other planets, the moon, and so on as being due to their whimsical love of geometry. It makes other forces, other causes, equally arbitrary -- do we presume that electrostatic forces are caused by gnomes? Or pixies? Or is it just a field...

Clearly somebody that believes gravity was caused by fairies is dangerous, where the word now has precise meaning. The theory of gravitation is a self-consistent "truth" with quantitatively precise rules that are constantly tested and verified. We have reason to believe in them. Fairy rules are arbitrary (unless one cheats and makes the little suckers use Newton's rules to decide what to do:-). Would you want to fly in a plane designed by someone who thought gravity was caused by fairies, who put lots of little handles on the upper wing to make it easier for them to get a grip?

True belief in the bible is just as dangerous. By true belief, I mean specifically the acceptance of the entire document as inerrant truth -- assigning every verse in it the provisional truth value of infinity (or some really, really big number) on our sigmoidal scale and thereby distorting the rest of the human web of knowledge beyond recognition as they struggle to resolve the many visible conflicts. Belief in the biblical creation myth as literal truth and holding fast to that belief independent of any evidence to the contrary, in spite of the fact that it is just one possible story out of an infinity of possible stories and to the deliberate mental disconnection of the hypothesis from the entire mass of observations and hypotheses that contradict it is dangerous.

This quantifies, I trust, my assertion that all beliefs are not equal. Your opinion is, in fact, not necessarily as good as mine. If my opinion is connected to more "facts" (where we now have to understand the word to mean things that we consistently believe at a level of say 10 or higher), to a larger and more consistent fraction of our web of knowledge, my opinion is quantitatively better than yours. A true believer's opinion, which is deliberately disconnected from that web and attempts to put the cart of their beliefs before the horse of reason, has an opinion that isn't worth taking seriously, seriously. Almost by definition.

And yes, they are, in fact, dangerous, as my example links demonstrate.

rgb

Dear Kristjan,

Allow me to continue my exposition. In Cox's book on The Algebra of Probable Inference or George Boole's Investigation of the Laws of Thought or some work done by Laplace that is difficult to find in a clear algebraic form, the theory of plausible belief is quantitatively developed. E. T. Jaynes took Cox's examples from his book and added many of his own, showing that this algebra of knowledge (which embodies Bayes theorem, because knowledge is a linked network of mutually supporting propositions and observations, connected by associations and joint probabilities) correctly describes the way we reason.

The key aspect of Boolean algebra as a mechanism for deduction is that if one replaces the binary truth values e.g. 0 and 1 with a continuum of values that range from 0 to 1, the exactly same algebra describes the Bayesian probability theory of Laplace (although it goes beyond, providing one with prescriptions for the best ways to assign probabilities on the basis of limited evidence).

So, we are born in a state of near perfect ignorance -- we "know" almost nothing besides that we are experiencing, we are awash in a flood of sensory information that resonates in our developing memory. Our state of knowledge of any proposition concerning the outside world is not 0 (knowledge that the proposition is false) or 1 (knowledge that the proposition is true), it is e.g. 0.5 -- a perfect "I don't know". We don't even have a logical framework upon which to base knowledge.

However, miraculously enough, we have evolved to learn, because all the niches for sessile creatures that don't need to learn were already filled, and in order to eat them our remote ancestors had to do more than "be" and wait for food to drift by. To go find food, the lowliest non-sessile animal has to have a map of the world inside to guide them, has to have at least a rudimentary ontology. And of course there is a huge advantage in having a good ontological map: memory and reason capable of abstracting patterns from the memory that "predict the future".

As we learn, we eventually pick up language because our brains are literally programmed to do so (huge evolutionary advantage, a surprising number of feral child "experiments" that demonstrate that there is a narrow window where language can be acquired, and that without it we become like the beasts! (References on request, or GIYF.) Language permits us to form a very high order linguistic ontological map with an advanced syntax encoding reason. But what reason?

The problem we face is building a "world view" as we grow up, using a mix of language (encoding the experiences of others and a cultural memetic "memory" that can be transmitted without the need for personal experience) and experience of our own. "Don't stick bobby-pins into electrical outlets." vs "Bzzzt-ZAP! Owwwww!" (I learned this the hard way at age 2 and burned every finger on my right hand; you probably learned it the easy way.:-)

If you view life in terms of game theory, every experience (linguistically communicated or not) comes along with a risk/benefit analysis. If you are starving in the desert, you try the fruit even thought it might well be poisonous. If you are taking a tour through the desert with your kids after eating a huge meal and see one of your kids reaching for the exact same fruit to put in their mouths, it is "Don't eat that! It's poisonous!" Not it might be poisonous -- your kids don't yet have any judgment, and you're lucky if you've managed to teach them that "poisonous" is bad bad bad enough to keep them from trying it anyway.

We therefore teach our children in terms of absolutes. We were once taught in absolutes, with simple rules. Electricity will kill you. Fruits are poisonous unless they are in a bowl in the kitchen. It is good to sleep at nap time. It is bad to have a peeing contest in the driveway to see how far you can arch your stream in front of all the neighbors (did I mention that I have three sons?). We teach in black and white because some things are fatal -- if you don't know what you're doing!

Of course, most of what we learn like this is wrong. I stick all kinds of things in sockets now because I teach electricity and know how it works. This particular desert fruit is delicious, that one is in fact poisonous. Not all snakes are venomous. Black widows are, and since we have them in our garage be careful when you rummage around in corners. And yeah, peeing contests are fun, but don't have them in the driveway in front of the neighbors.:-)

When we really grow up, we eventually get to where we start addressing the big questions, the ones that cannot be glibly answered in terms of a binary criterion, questions that have no known answer. We learn that even being hit by 16,000 volts from a primary line transformer doesn't always kill you, but that it is possible to kill yourself with a 9 volt transistor radio battery (one of my favorite Darwin awards -- this actually happened). We learn that the most venomous snake in the world can bite you and choose not to inject venom, while a garter snake that bites you can cause a massive infection that kills you dead if you are careless about it. We learn that babies aren't always perfect, that our bodies and selves are complex and unpredictable, that one can too get pregnant without actually having sexual intercourse.

We learn that people lie, that people tell stories. We learn that even when we study things like gravity (a binary "truth" if ever we learned one) there is room for doubt -- we can imagine "antigravity machines" and do, and they are certainly possible, only implausible, and that only because no one has built one yet. We learn, and I am dead serious about this, that almost nothing we known about the world is really known as 0 or 1, it is all quantitative "degree of belief", some number in between!

What we have (for any proposition about the real world) is not a truth, it is our personal assessment of the probability that it is true. And, as I noted above but must reiterate, the set probabilities that constitute our "knowledge" are almost never independent, they are massively joint probabilities. Jaynes illustrates this beautifully with a number of examples, references on request. If you leave the kitchen with a piece of steak on the counter and come back to find it gone, it could have been stolen by robbers who snuck in while you were gone, it might have quantum mechanically tunneled into the ground, you conceivably could have put it there yesterday and had a small stroke and forgotten the entire day in between, but chances are good it is inside the dog who has crawled off into a corner and won't meet your eye. Bayes theorem and plausible reasoning in action. We do not weight all possibilities equally, because each event we assess must be analyzed in terms of our entire experience, everything we think that we "know".

And if we're wise, we don't jump to the conclusion that the most probable thing -- in our judgment -- is true. We've just released two prisoners from death row in NC who were both not just wrongfully convicted in terms of technicality, they were innocent, vindicated by DNA and evidence suppressed at their trials. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is a fluid thing, often abused, and based at best on what you know, which differs tremendously from person to person and which is tremendously distorted in a trial, where you see what two opposing sides want you to see and nothing more.

Out of characters -- back in a flash with part II (cont).

rgb said: Like I said, true believer are crazy scary, and dangerous too.

I think I am going to have to disagree with this one ... mostly because I think this debate is rather silly. Belief by definition holds something to be true, so either true belief is redundant OR it merely represents an evaluation or agreement by another party.

Example: Squiggles might say that Tommy is a true believer, signifying that he holds the same belief ... and that is it. Squiggles might also state that I am a false believer, indicating that he does not hold the same belief, yet I can assure you that I still hold it to be true. There is no requirement for a true believer to be a fanatic or evangelist of said belief within the definition of either term (or both combined) ...

Although your exposition on the Theory of Knowledge was very interesting/educational. Thank you for taking the time to put it together.

And BTW, did anyone else notice this automatic "ad sponsored by Google" off to the right on this very page on goodreads?

http://the-end.com/2008GodsFinalWitness/...

Like I said, true believer are crazy scary, and dangerous too. And no matter what Daniel says, Christians don't come with labels, warning or otherwise, beyond the name of their particular flavor if they have one. The bible says a lot of things. All it takes is a bit of interpretation and you've got people advocating the invasion of Iran to help bring about the end times, you've got people arguing that the United States will cease to exist over the course of this year because they are convinced that they are upon us.

That's not to suggest that all Christians are lunatics. There is no such thing as all Christians. Each person, one at a time, has their own set of beliefs, may or may not choose to call themselves Christian, and may or may not be a lunatic. Atheists can be lunatics too. But one symptom of spiritual lunacy is extremism -- "true belief", fanaticism, a willingness to submit to authority.

Even as I'm sure this statement will have many scrambling for their mouse to defend their true belief, just remember -- you will be equally eager to condemn precisely this sort of extremism in others. Nazi's believed in Hitler, and Hitler believed in himself. They were fanatic -- willing to do anything to advance their cause. Germans were willing to submit to his authority. I'm not saying that you are or are not in this category; I'm saying that doubt and tolerance are an essential part of humility and are the opposite of "true belief" and fanaticism.

Just a thought. It is, by the way, just one example of what I would call "Christian fanaticism"; Google will reveal a hundred thousand more, many equally scary. Not scary because I particularly expect the rapture to start tomorrow and to be left behind (or for the world to end in 2012 like the Mayan calendar supposedly predicts, or for the next yuga to be right around the corner, or for the enormous volcano underneath Yellowstone to wake up and destroy a big chunk of the US -- the one thing that is actually not as unlikely as I'd like it to be, based on actual historical evidence). Scary because -- these people vote. Scary because they want, in a strange and demented way, to see the "seas run with blood", to see Israel re-destroyed, to see Jesus with flaming sword duel the Antichrist. To be vindicated in their belief, to get even for all the grief they've gotten, believing in creation and so on in the face of evidence for evolution and big bangs.

Scary indeed.

rgb

Dear Squiggles,

"Like Barack Obama, for instance"???

Visit:

http://www.raptureready.com/who/John_Hag...

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/...

http://www.streetprophets.com/storyonly/...

Now, if you tell me John Hagee "is a true Christian", we'll have to start a separate thread just to contain the rage. Obama (like McCain) is no idiot. Unlike McCain, at least so far, he has refrained from seeking the endorsement of dangerous whack-job Christians who are actively pushing public policy with the aim of bringing about the end times now.

That, my friend, is using Christianity to get what he wants -- the fundamentalist vote -- when McCain is no more of a fundamentalist than I am. Or Obama. Or Clinton. Sorry, but it is high time we get fundamentalism out of the white house. IMHO, of course.

The truly dangerous thing is that by accepting this sort of endorsement publicly, McCain becomes beholden to Hagee. Scary, scary, scary.

And Tommy, this is a real-world example of what I mean when I say that true believers are dangerous. You say that you have a hard time with Revelations. Why? Isn't it yet another part of the inerrant bible? Aren't you willing to believe what you are told about it by an "authority" like Hagee? If not, why not? Could it be because somewhere in there you have a moral sense and ability to think critically outside of authority?

Just asking...

rgb

Hi, John,

On topic:

The Lucifer Principle
The Algebra of Probable Reason

Dialogues Concerning a Natural Relgion (David Hume)
Why I am Not A Christian (Bertrand Russell)

The Upanishads (see also thread opened for a discussion of the Upanishads, many of which are accessible online for those who are still stinging from April 15).

The Book of Lilith (Yes, I wrote it, but the entire book is about a spiritual journey and an alternate view of the story of Genesis, an extended metaphor if you like, and is ultimately quite serious as fiction goes. I apologize if posting it is viewed as SPAM.)

The Mahabharata (And by inclusion, the Bhagvad-Gita, in context).

Siddhartha (Hesse, of course -- beautiful book.)

Inferno (By Niven and Pournelle -- an alternative vision of Hell that includes an interesting purpose.)

Problems in Philosophy (Bertrand Russell again, 1912. Available online for free if you google for it. Arguably the best summation of western philosophy ever written.)

Zen Flesh, Zen Bone (A compendium of three different books of Zen Koans. Well worth a read. Note well, the Koans say nothing about God and are in no way incompatible with Christianity or any other religion -- their purpose is something else entirely.)

The Way of Zen (by Alan Watts. Again, a brilliant book, strongly recommended. Again, says not one word about God, except to note that Hindus converted Buddha into an avatar of Vishnu in order to co-opt Buddhism back into their own faith; Buddha in fact explicitly warned his followers not to waste time thinking on and arguing about God, and absolutely never claimed to be God. Quite the contrary. As the Zen saying goes, "Kill the Buddha.")

The Impersonal Life (my very old copy is by anonymous, but it might have a human name associated with it by now. This is a book on Christian Zen, more or less. It is written in first person from the point of view of God speaking inside the human spirit of the reader. Very powerful, arrives at almost precisely the same conclusions, as it were, as do the Upanishads, or the books on Zen.)

The Screwtape Letters
The Chronicles of Narnia
Azazel (by Isaac Asimov)
Letters from Earth (Mark Twain)

(Three of the above are letters written by a demon or Satan or a devil or stories associated with the same, Moral Tales in a manner of speaking. Narnia is Lewis's thinly veiled Christian metaphor -- Jesus as Lion, magic and miracle in abundance, physics an illusion as the universes in question are effectively pocket universes, finite and transient. Moral Lessons galore. And fun, a damn good read. Great morality, but otherwise yes, it is a fantasy.)

Lilith (George MacDonald, "a frankly wierd little tale" that strongly influenced C. S. Lewis. MacDonald was another Christian fantasist. The interesting thing about this one is that it presents an idea of "no soul left behind" that I actually find appealing, that is similar to that presented in Inferno above. Basically no human sinner, no matter how wicked they were in life, is beyond the mercy of Christ, and they have an eternity in a sort of half-life fantasy universe to come around.)

There are probably others I'll think of, but this will do for now.

I'd be interested in doing group discussions on nearly any of the above, especially The Book of Lilith. If there is any interest in that, I'd be happy to provide a free PDF copy of the book to list members only on request, or of course you can support starving artists and buy a copy electronic or paper... or both, read it electronically for now and if you LIKE it buy a copy later.

After all, a few people have indicated that they like my writing on list, so who knows? You might like it on paper as well! :-)

rgb

no need to go find the post, i know what i said. i said "you seem to like doing that." there were several times that you said something, then when tommy started forming an argument against what you said you would turn around and say "No, THAT'S not what i said...THIS is what i said..." i apologize if i severely misinterpreted what you were saying, but in the future, be more clear on what you actually are saying. you won't have to go back and clarify, thus making it easier for us all to understand what you are saying.

anyway, here's something you DID say: "Basically, I think it is important for those who would call themselves "true" Christians to understand and acknowledge that those they don't consider true Christians tend to believe they ARE true Christians."

ok, so they believe they ARE true Christians. you aren't putting something new in here. in truth you are simply helping tomy's argument out. just because they believe that they ARE true Christians doesn't MAKE them true Christians.

Good grief. Tommy DOES NOT speak for his interpretation of true Christians. i suggest you visit the thread "A Statistic for Atheists to consider." Daniel meticulously outlined WHAT makes a true Christian. he stated that it isn't OUR interpretation; it is Christ's. we are simply holding to His interpretation. many "Christians" are simply nominal; they don't really know what makes a true Christian, or they simply use Christianity to get what they want. like Barack Obama for instance.

Actually you did. You said something to the effect of Don't say you didn;t say it, you are always saying you didnt. OR something to that effect. If you want me to find the post I will

Honestly, on looking back I see that you did never say anything about Satan. in truth I am honestly not sure where i got that from. I apologize for that.

"You really do like putting words in my mouth and then get sarcastic when I say I never said it."

LOL! I do not do this. i didn't do it there, and i haven't done it prior either.

What I am saying Squiggles is that even though Tommy wouldnt call them true Christians, they are a HUGE portion of the people in this world who DO call themselves Christians and are often the ones that people think of when the world Christians is mentioned.

I never said they are followers of Satan. I never once brought up Satan, so I don't know why you do.
You really do like putting words in my mouth and then get sarcastic when I say I never said it. But in truth I didn;t, so you are defintiely putting words in my mouth.

I do not believe in the devil. I believe that the universe/God is both good, evil and everything in between, it is whole and encompasses every form of exisitence and being. But that of course, has nothing to do with what I was talking about in my last post.

Basically, I think it is important for those who would call themselves "true" Christians to understand and acknowledge that those they don't consider true Christians tend to believe they ARE true Christians.

And they are in our communities and country and world presenting THEIR beliefs as true Christian beliefs. So it is no wonder many people have a negative perception of "Christians" and what is done in their name.

I agree with Tommy as I said, they they are not True in the sense that they do not follow Christ's teachings as one would expect. BUT they believe they do. So how does one draw the line?

They say they are Christians, they try and impose their beliefs as Christians onto others. They come in all denominations, they persecute others (including other Christians).

So the reality is Tommy speaks for his interpretation of Christianity. And all these others speak for theirs. And many of the negative perceptions people are having against Christians are because of all these different interpretations of what Christian is.

Then what are you saying, Terri? you've simply reiterated what Tommy's been talking about this whole time. He never once said that these people are followers of Satan.

Tommy, I know you say that all these people and governments are not following the teachings of Christ. I agree with that totally, but that said, THEY believe they are Christians, and they likely pray in the name of Jesus as well. And read the Bible. Most hypocrits do not believe they ARE hypocrits. Bush probably believes he is a good Christian. That is a sad and scary thought to me.

But the major issues are these people CALL themselves Christian, they are identified by others based on this. Some ministers steal money and are greedy and sometimes adulters as well. But the people of their churches are listening to them, believing in them and their preachings. And a lot of people who call themselves Christians are hypocrits. You wouldnt identify them as Christians but they DO. When people are talking about Christians in this society, they are often talking about these people. It may not be right, but it is a reality.

This truth relationship has nothing to do with belief. The pennies themselves do -- they require the belief that they are really there, that they have an independent existence outside of the process of your awareness of them, they require a kind of "belief" in the fiction that these unique objects can be categorized and represented by a single semantic descriptor, a symbol, as part of a universal ontology, a set of symbols in supposed one-to-one correspondance with a presumed real world.

Now that you have some initial idea of just how difficult the theory of knowledge really is -- it becomes sublimely subtle when we attempt to know the theory of knowledge itself within our semantic web of word-symbols, after we have derived Godel's theorem and understand the reason based limits on reason itself in systems of this sort -- we can try to ask what is the truth of these pennies, to separate out that truth into parts that are based on reason -- true in the abstract once a suitable act establishes a relationship between the reality and the symbols -- that are what we might call "existential truth" -- absolutely true but indescribable in a system of symbols -- and that are "knowledge" -- truth as imperfectly realized in the set of symbols itself in many levels, but ultimately in the heart of your "self" where knowledge is occurring dynamically in time.

In order, we should properly begin with the existential reality, in spite of the fact that it is the most difficult because we can only know of it indirectly. It begins, therefore, with an act of faith. All that you know is that you are experiencing. Without symbols. The symbols, your "thoughts", your sensory experiences, your memories, all are symbolic names for parts of the experiencing. So the first and most fundamental belief that you have is that all of this experiencing is in a symbolic correspondence to a existential reality that is not just self, that it is in part other. You believe that whatever your name for them, whether or not they are being perceived on the table or are hidden in your pocket, whatever their fundamental nature at the dynamic subatomic level, the things you are choosing to call pennies are really there.

This is faith because you cannot prove it using pure reason. Seriously. You must assume it to be true in order to begin to use reason. It is an axiom, but a new kind -- it itself is not a logical or mathematical postulate, it is an existential postulate. In order to go further, one needs next to establish, or at least recognize, the relationship between the existential reality of the pennies and your symbolic experiential personal reality. There is something real out there, and there is also something real in here that is a mapping between things happening in here and things existing out there. What you see isn't "reality", but it is a distorted, blurred, finite resolution, near-instantaneous series of symbolic snapshots (plus echos of those snapshots drifting back, with ever less preserved information, into what we eventually will name the past, name our memory). Plus touch, taste, smell, sounds, plus an even more unusual kind of experience that I will imperfectly symbolically label "awareness" without trying too hard to symbolically deconstruct it as it is a bootstrap process, for all that it is a significant part of your "self".

Thus far, we have reached what we might imagine the degree of knowledge of a fairly generic animal. When you completely turn off all the voices in your head, when you focus completely on just "being aware" of being aware, when you do not utilize your symbolic reasoning capacity at all, when you let go even of your knowledge of time and stop visualizing or anticipating a future or remembering a past, when you are just right here, right now, you are in a state that is like a mirror. Things occur in existential reality. They are associated with a corresponding sensory-experiential map in self, of unknown accuracy. The reality of the latter does not require axioms! You don't "believe" that you exist, you are existing. It is the one absolutely certain existential truth you have to work with -- everything else will require assumptions, axioms, reason.

To this we add words. We add language. We add symbolic maps (including non-linguistic ones, actual maps, visualizations of abstractions such as geometric shapes, all of which have a language, an ontology, of their own even if we never write it down or formally define it). Language, it should be carefully noted, compresses knowledge of existential reality as perceived through the senses. The unique information required to specify an object -- a vast quantity of information indeed, even for a humble object such as a penny -- is thrown away as "unimportant" and only certain bits retained that are then associated with the symbol "penny". We invent the word, nay, we invent the entire language of which "penny" is but a single word, a language with implicit axioms of its own in abundance. The most important of these, for our purpose here, is that when we reason about pennies using logic verbal and symbolic, we wish to preserve the map between our reason-manipulated internal symbols and the existentially real objects that we believe are there in correspondence with those symbols.

When the association is successful -- when we count pennies and observe that (a set of) 2 pennies plus (a set of) 2 pennies makes (a set of) 4 pennies, when we realize that we cannot manipulate sets of pennies as countable objects in any way that produces results in violation with our abstract conclusions from the axiomatic theory of arithmetic, we are at last able to reason about pennies in certain ways and count this as knowledge of pennies. When the association is unsuccessful -- for example, if we try to take "the square root of two pennies" and end up with nonsense, because 1.414... pennies is actually just one penny and one object that used to be a penny until you chopped it into two pieces with infinite (and hence impossible) precision -- we do not count that as "knowledge of pennies". It is inconsistent, an error, wrong in some way. Sometimes we can discover new sets of axioms -- such as the axioms of real number arithmetic, where abstract knowledge of 1.5 pennies makes some sort of sense for some suitable extension of the definition of penny. Sometimes not.

We're almost there, you can do it.

Now, this last step is the one you aren't grasping. Our knowledge of the penny is (as you can see from all of the above) contingent knowledge. All we really have is our experiencing colors and shapes and touches and memories, all the sense is derived from symbolic maps, from language, and from reason, and all of those things require unprovable assumptions to be made, sets of symbolic definitions that realize those assumptions, sets of derived rules and conclusions built by means of reason from those assumptions, and -- wait for it -- an ongoing correspondence between the symbols that matches the ongoing sensory experiencing of the presumed external world!

Our knowledge is then contingent, and interconnected. It requires a whole language of symbols. We are constantly forced to propose sets of symbols and axioms to establish correspondence between symbol and experience against the sole test of the result "working" or "not working", where (because our knowledge is filtered and finite) we have to work very hard to achieve good compression (aided by a marvelously structured Universe, one that appears designed to be so known:-). At no time is faith or true belief needed in the course of reason itself. At no point is certainty attained. Contingent knowledge, not true belief.

rgb

Tommy, you fail to hear a single word I am saying. I'm not trying to teach you about religion at the moment, I'm trying to teach you some mathematics and the foundational basis of science. If I understand things correctly, you're 15, right? So you should have just taken plane geometry, and maybe you are taking biology and/or chemistry? Ask your math teacher about logic and belief, specifically about the laws of thought. Or visit this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

for (as usual) an excellent exposition to the basic ideas of the subject. Note well that the article isn't by itself anything like complete, of course -- it cannot be. But by going on an extended wiki-romp and following links and links to links to links and going back to the beginning and starting again and going down different tracks, you can learn a lot about formal and symbolic logic, about set theory, about deduction, consistency, soundness, completeness. You can even work through to Godel's theorem in time and learn about the peculiar problems of logic in self-referential systems (such as English) and the various paradoxes of logic (and how to overcome them by using precise formulations of logical systems that exclude them).

If you study this, or even think deeply about the process of derivation of theorems in your plane geometry class, you will learn that I do not believe in logic. Logic is logic. It is utterly indifferent to belief. Belief is not necessary or desirable. Logic is a constructive process (reducible to a purely algebraic process in many cases) for constructing a self-consistent web of symbolic statements.

Again, as I explained in considerable detail perhaps three times already (but, sigh, will explain yet again, with example to make it very clear) a system of reason is built, using logic, from a very small set of assumptions called axioms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom

Axioms are often considered "self-evident truths", but if you read further down in the article on modern usage you will see that with the possible exception of logical axioms (which are indeed considered self-evident truth, not truth requiring either proof or belief) in modern mathematics they are simply postulates, assumptions upon which a theory is built, and have no intrinsic truth value.

There is nothing for you to argue about here, at least so far. If you try to pursue your argument above and paint mathematics or systems of reason themselves as being something that requires belief true or otherwise, all you are going to be doing is demonstrating a particularly stubborn form of ignorance in public, one that involves some sort of personalized redefinition of common terms with accepted meanings. Instead of doing this, pretend that I'm actually a mathematics teacher and try to just learn because -- surprise -- that's (among other things) what I am.

Now listen (metaphorically speaking:-) carefully, as here is the important part. As you can learn if you study the above and maybe visit here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axiom...

to see an actual realization of a system you learned when you were perhaps six in formal logic and axiomatic reasoning, so that you can perhaps come to understand something of the process beyond what you learned (or not, alas) in plane geometry, while the axioms from which a theory is derived have no intrinsic truth value, as one develops systems of symbols that are defined to realize the axioms of a theory, such as "numbers" as a realization of the axioms of arithmetic, one observes that there are associations between the formal set of symbols that realize the theory and linguistic symbols that form a semantic map or ontology to the real world. I'll provide two more links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics

These last two are really difficult -- you will probably not understand them much the first time you try to read them, but they are something that you need to understand in order to form a picture of how reason works, because reason itself is a little miracle. (In the future, whenever you encounter something that looks like a technical term that you don't understand, please just go ahead and look it up on wikipedia. Ignorance is a disease, of sorts, but it is curable. However, the sick person has to want to be cured, and try to be cured, as there is no simple medicine, and alas all too often the disease turns out to be self-sustaining.)

To help you figure it out, let me give an example. Reach into your pocket and pull out a bunch of pennies and put them on the table. You understand this sentence (a miracle already) because the linguistic symbol "penny" describes thin round slivers of copper faced metal sandwich with a particular relief pattern on both sides, a particular size and weight (within a tolerance), and a particular origin and purpose. If I made something that precisely resembles a penny it wouldn't be a penny because only the government can make pennies -- I can only make forgeries that are not really pennies. Pennies are pennies in part because of their history, not just their immediate state.

As you meditate on a penny, note that in my descriptions of a penny I had to describe the symbol in terms of other symbols. Those symbols are defined in turn in terms of other symbols. Some of the symbols referred to "things", others to "properties" (adjectives like round, for example), still others were abstract and referred to an entire system of law, government and economics. The symbol penny is shorthand for a complex network of entertwined relationships with other symbols.

And yet, you know perfectly well what a penny is -- there are several of them, you are pretty sure (not having watched the pennies from their time of creation, you can't be certain that none of them are forgeries) on the table in front of you, if you're actually playing along with this little demonstration. Now let's explore another miracle.

Pick up two pennies, one in each hand. Look at them closely. Note how the two pennies are different. One is in your left hand, one in your right. One has a little nick on the rim above Lincoln's head, the other is tarnished. The thing in your right hand is absolutely unique. Every single particle that makes it up is unique, and different from the particles that make up the thing in your left hand. Yet your mind can average over those differences and abstract the notion of "penniness" and identify the symbol with the pile of concrete, unique, objects on the object in front of the object that is -- yourself. Somewhere inside of you, there is yet another realization of "penniness", that is still more abstract, for you hold those pennies in your mind as a complex pattern of bioelectrical neural activity that symbolically represents them just as surely as the physical objects are held up by the table they rest on.

Now, think back in time to when you were in kindergarten, and learning numbers and arithmetic, quite possibly with pennies. Count the pennies! As you do so, note the one to one association between the symbols you use for numbers -- one, two, three..., the axiom based theory of arithmetic as a self-consistent set of true statements associated with arbitrary symbolic realizations of those axioms, and the physical objects you are counting. In no sense whatsoever is the unique penny you begin with the number "one". One is an absolutely abstract idea. And yet you count, one, two, three, four...

You rapidly learn -- and once learned in the opposite order -- that every true statement reason provided you about numbers is necessarily true when applied to your counting groupings of pennies. (cont)

But Robert, you have to believe that your reason isn't flawed, correct? If your reason was flawed, then all of the things that you reason are true wouldn't be as true as you say they are. Now, I'm saying that the world is flat, that the earth is the center of the universe, that's not what I'm saying. I'm also not saying that you're an atheist. What I'm saying is that even if you don't believe in anything, you believe in something. If you believe in nothing, then you believe in that concept that there is nothing to believe in. But that's not the point. How is your belief in reason, in yourself (essentially), any different from my belief in God? You are a true believer in reason. You truly believe in your logic, in your reason. Therefore, you are a true believer in reason. Thus, you incorporate yourself when you say things like all true-believers are dangerous, because you do not specify what one must believe in to be considered dangerous.

Am I just wasting my time with you, Tommy? Do you really not "get" any of the above? It isn't really that difficult -- it is really pretty easy.

I'm not dangerous because I know what I know, how I know it, and precisely where and how the beliefs that are its basis come about. All that I accept as true in physics is contingent truth, not true belief. "Belief" in the sense that you use the word is neither necessary nor desirable! I expect you to believe nothing at all on the basis of my, or Galileo's, or Kepler's, or Newton's authority. You can your very own self verify their hypotheses, compare the results of your own eyes, your own observations, to their predictions. It doesn't require faith of the sort that you must hold fast to to "believe in the bible" in the face of its manifest disagreements with physics -- it requires reason of the "I believe my own eyes" sort.

Nor is it irreligious. Very few physicists are atheists, for all that I suspect that only a tiny minority are inerrant bible Christians. I am reminded of a poem by George Meredith that I'd like to share with you:

Lucifer in Starlight

ON a starr'd night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen'd,
Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he lean'd,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careen'd,
Now the black planet shadow'd Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that prick'd his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach'd a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank.
Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.



What more can one say?

rgb

The laws of thought are not subject to belief. They are just plain true. So no, I am not a true believer in reason in the sense that you are trying to advance in a syllogism. I'm almost certain that I've developed this entire argument once before in our interminable discussions, but if you missed it the first time I'll try, try again.

In order to develop any system of reason with the laws of thought requires axioms. Axioms are not "true beliefs", they are assumptions. The word "axiom" means "That which is assumed" or perhaps "That which is thought worthy". They are the propositions one assumes to be true in order to develop a system of reason such as plane geometry, calculus, physics.

When I say that they are not true beliefs, I mean it. Early mathematicians and philosophers (especially e.g. Pythogoras) created a religion out of mathematics once they observed its incredible power, and effectively granted certain axioms the status of "truth" at a higher level than assumption. Euclid's geometry was taught as manifest truth leading to reasoned conclusions (theorems) for millennia. Then along came heretics such as Riemmann, who changed the axioms and deduced curved space geometry which arrived at different, equally valid conclusions.

From this we -- by we I mean "people who study reason", that is mathematicians and others who wish to learn to reason correctly -- learned that mathematics was far larger than was previously appreciated. By varying the axioms one could derive completely distinct systems of reason, all of them consistent in that, using the laws of thought, they reasoned from the presumed truth of the axioms to contingent truths as theorems.

In much the same time frame (1400's through the present, really -- the Enlightenment), people were starting to examine the basis of real religions in reason. They were also trying to apply reason and mathematics to the world in new ways. They did this for one reason and one reason only -- it worked.

Galileo was a major figure that kicked things off. The bible was held to be absolute truth. As we might guess from discussing reason in the context of mathematics where it has a precise and systematic definition and method of application, we can now see that this is an axiom -- an assumption that one can use as the starting point for a system of reason. Using the bible as a whole set of axioms -- every verse, in fact, is an axiom -- one can test its suitability as a system of reason using the laws of thought to judge its internal consistency. For example, if one starts with the axioms of plane geometry and number theory and then add the axiom "The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is three" (ooo, the temptation to address Kings 7:23 -- must -- resist --:-) then we get a contradiction. Some axiom or axioms in the set must be false.

We've already seen that there is no evidence that could convince you of internal inconsistency in the bible -- you simply reinterpret the verses to make the inconsistency either go away, or cease to mean anything at all, or something. There is always an explanation, one contradiction at a time, because the simple explanation: "the bible is not inerrant truth because it is internally inconsistent" is unacceptable to you, violating your prime axiom held as a true belief, outside even the laws of thought.

Galileo thought up a whole new method of determining truth. It was called "looking"; comparing the statements in the bible and elsewhere with observations made of the real world. The bible clearly describes a world that is flat, finite, circular, with a big solid bowl for a sky, floating on a vast "deep" of waters, waters that supposedly "rose up" during a flood to cover the entire earth -- an image that only makes sense if the earth was viewed as a plate resting in a bucket of water and could just be pushed under. It describes a sun and moon that move around this plate, passing underneath it, moving from east to west. It describes mountains and trees high enough that one can see the whole thing at once. It describes a moon that glowed with its own light and was similar to the sun. It describes stars that wandered about on the bowl of the firmament but that could be shaken down by earthquakes, because of course the whole structure was of a piece. And Tommy, none of this can really be "interpreted" away, as at the time it was thought to be absolute, unquestionable truth, mostly because that's exactly what it says -- no real need for much interpretation. The writers were describing, after all, what they thought they were seeing with their own, mortal and not particularly divinely inspired, eyes.

Galileo built instruments that let him see better. Using them, he could see that the moon was a big ball, that it glowed with the reflected light of the sun, and that the earth was almost certainly a ball as well (as the non-Christian, uninspired Greeks had worked out 1800 years previously, the heathen pre-Hindus even before that). He could see that the planets were also balls. He could see that the earth almost certainly was orbiting the sun, and that the bible was wrong, wrong, wrong.

At this point, it was arguably still a belief, but Galileo's work showed that it was possible to see geometry in the workings of the Universe, and humans have always loved to discover patterns and order. Kepler and Tycho Brahe took Galileo's ideas and made systematic observations of the planets, and showed them to be consistent with Kepler's laws.

Kepler's laws were some of the first mathematical formulations that explained physical observations. Not the first, but one of the most powerful. Planets moved about the sun in elliptical orbits, swept out equal areas (in the plane of their orbit) in equal times, and had a particular ratio in common. These were no longer beliefs -- Galileo was posthumously vindicated, the bible was proven wrong and anyone who wished to repeat the observations could see this for themselves, and many did, all over the world.

One who saw best and deepest was Newton. Kepler's laws aren't causes -- they are empirical rules that describe the systematic correlations in a set of observations. As such, they are true each and every time one observes them to be true, but we have no sense of why they are true or whether things might have been different or might one day be different. If you wanted to make a case for divine inspiration, you could do worse than to point to Newton's accomplishments as coming straight from God into his mind. I'd believe it.

Newton invented calculus to describe the mathematics of change, of dynamics. He rejected the crap physics of Aristotle with a wave and a sniff. He proposed a new physics based on his calculus. He proposed a force law as a cause of the motion of the planets, applied his equations of motion, solved the mathematicaly problem in calculus, and proved Kepler's Laws to be contingent truth! People quickly used his new physics to quantitatively describe everything from the motion of the planets to the way blood flows through arteries, and deduced new rules that deconstructed light itself in terms of elementary, unified fields similar to gravity.

The new approach to knowledge and reason did not, I repeat, not, rely on "true belief". It relied on plausible belief on evidence, on a mix of hypothesis and observation. And it works. You and I can communicate because of the miracle of how well it works.

Compare this kind of contingent truth with what you are bandying about as absolute truth, Tommy. Which one is the sounder?

rgb

I'm not talking about all beliefs being reasonable, Robert. (I'm not going to get into the rapture and all that stuff, mostly because Revelation is, at least for me, the hardest book of the Bible to understand. Not even to mention that I don't believe in it as per the Left Behind Series.)

I'm asking you if you are a true-believer in reason? If so, you would include yourself in the statement you made about true believers being dangerous. So, with all that said, are you a "true believer" in logic, in reason?

Tommy, I understand very well the point where faith is needed in order to make sense of the world. Almost certainly better than you do, but perhaps I'm mistaken. I'm writing a book on it, though, and teach it as the fundamental basis for science.

However, that does not make all beliefs equally reasonable, as I've explained, in detail, repeatedly. Are you just ignoring what I say? Is it too difficult to understand? Do I need to explain it again? Will you listen this time?

As an example of why reason is important and why true belief in the inerrant bible is scary: If you believe the Universe is 6000 years old, then all of the evidence on glaciation and global temperature variation over the last few million years is of course some sort of atheistic non-Christian fantasy. This makes your participation in any sort of reasoned debate on things like Global Warming irrational in the extreme, and hence yes, quite dangerous. Or for that matter, any other scientific or technical issue. Who knows when you'll refer to the bible and use it to justify some insanity like the removal of public funds from museums (because they show people dinosaur bones arranged so one can see the progression of evolution)? Who knows when you'll force "intelligent design" to be taught as "science" in schools? These are real contemporary issues where your beliefs are scary indeed.

Then there is the Rapture on the other side of things, the future. For example, sites such as:

http://www.raptureready.com/rr-pretribul...

So, Tommy, what's your take on the rapture? Have you read Left Behind? All eleven or twelve volumes? Is it a favorite fantasy? I don't think you have any idea how scary this is to non-believers. Not the coming of Christ -- if Christ would slay me or cast me into a fiery furnace for my reasoned beliefs he is not God, and if he is God then in good time I'll figure it out, when there is evidence to support it.

No, the scary thing is that there are Christians everywhere that expect the rapture to be around the metaphorical corner. They try to read the signs in the news. There is reason to believe that there are Christians who are doing their best to bring about those signs because to a Christian the rapture is a good thing! Unless you are a Jew in Israel, or pretty much anybody on the planet who is not a Christian, of course.

After all, that's when the Antichrist gets it. So do all the false Christians, all the unsaved sinners, and 2/3 of the Jews in Israel. The seas run with blood, the holy land is drowned in it. And Christ comes down and smites with a sword. Bish! Bam! Die, godless heathen die! And then the good guys get to live forever and do whatever it is that you think would fill forever and not pall.

This is a major problem for believers as long as it is an unfulfilled prophecy. Of course, a non-biblical inerrantist might read it and conclude that John actually was making predictions that he thought would come true right away -- for a variety of reasons. But no matter; there are a lot of Christians who are tired of waiting. They want it now.

Why is it surprising that non-Christians would fear a plurality that has this as their favorite fantasy, their expression of wish-fulfillment? Getting taken up? Boy, that would show them all. It would sure show them who was right, wouldn't it.

Again, this isn't all Christians. Perhaps it isn't even most. Christians write about it, and against it, e.g. here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/barnwell/barn...

However, this is a mindset that thrives on a fundamentalist, literalist, inerrant bible point of view, especially one that also pushes a persecution complex, the very one we've heard in this thread repeatedly and that you encourage, Tommy.

There is reason to believe that this mindset has already influenced public policy, and may be influencing our posturing against Iran even now. Scary beyond measure.

rgb

It seems, Robert, that you and I can agree on at least one thing: that America isn't a Christian country. Despite the fact that the reason why America exists is because of Christians trying to escape persecution (which was like...what...300 years ago), America is no longer a Christian nation.

I also need to point something out. You say that you are not a "true believer" yet you also say that you believe in reason! I quote from above: "I am not a "true believer" in anything at all but the process of reason itself" So you do believe in something? Do you truly believe in that something? Then you are a true believer. Thus, you incorporate yourself in the statement that true believers are dangerous.

Dear Tommy,

With your question answered in detail, again, (except for my ignoring the logically self-contradictory statement that I have to believe in something even if it is nothing, except for providing examples of the dangers of unreason -- again -- as the entire history of the world shows the danger of unreason) let is turn to gays, just briefly.

Nobody cares whether or not you are gay. Each person must make choices like this for themselves, to the extent that it is truly a choice. There is (again) ample evidence in biology that homosexuality isn't the free choice that you seem to think that it is, that indeed sex, gender identity, and much more are determined by many things, some of them genetic things completely out of one's control. For you to learn about this, I'm afraid you'd have to learn some science which you refuse to do, so you will doubtless judge them and judge the world on the basis of what you experience and choose and reject any possibility that others -- even those poor souls born in an openly intergender state -- might actually be different. But I'm certain the bible has a compassionate solution for intergender individuals, as well as a certain means of identifying them way back in the dark ages so that they could know when the execution of people for apparently homosexual behavior was just.

When you say "I cannot and will not abide the behavior", if you mean by that you will not participate in homosexual activity, that's fine. Nobody says that you must, last I heard.

If you mean that you will take any action to prohibit homosexual activity on the part of others by means of legal sanctions -- making it illegal to be gay, to engage in oral or anal sex, to hold hands with or kiss a same-sex partner under the same circumstances that society tolerates the behavior for heterosexual couples, prohibiting homosexual couples from forming life-bonding civil marriages -- that is indeed called "persecution".

Note that there is a clear line here that separates persecution from tolerance. You are absolutely responsible for your own behavior as they are for theirs. They have no right to force their views or behavior on you. You, in turn, have absolutely no right to use force in the form of police, jail, fines, civil penalties, differential benefits on insurance policies or inheritance and so on to force your views and behavior on others.

So not abiding the behavior as in not participating in it, fine. Not abiding it as in personally choosing not to associate with gay people, that's your right and privilege in a free society. Enforcing any sort of prohibition on gay behavior that is not completely symmetric in its impact on straight behavior (such as, no sexual intercourse on public street corners no matter what your sexual orientation:-) is not OK.

As far as expressing your feelings about the behavior to a gay person or couple, well, I personally would consider it to be in bad taste and extremely rude. After all, you'd doubtless be offended if the gay people openly tried to hit on you and convince you to become gay. The converse golden rule is a lovely thing to use to regulate behavior in a free society:

"Don't do unto others what you would have them not do unto you."

If you want to be free from proselytizing gays, don't proselytize heterosexuality to them.

If you want to be free of legal controls on your religion, don't push for legal controls of other religions, for prayer in schools, don't assert that the US is a "Christian country". It is not, and those of us who are not Christian find that sort of statement to be more than a bit scary.

Again, it is not true. The U.S.'s most important founders were openly deist at a time when it took considerable personal courage to be a deist, to publicly reject Christianity along with monarchy supported by Christian-sanctioned "divine right to rule", as Christians historically have persecuted blasphemers and heretics in ways ranging from mere ostracism to execution wherever they have been the dominant culture, with plenty of Christian on Christian war and persecution mixed in there involving the details of belief.

That's why there are Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Methodists, Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and various other sects and sub-sects, all differentiated by different "divine inspirations" along the way, different interpretations of the bible. Of course, only YOUR PERSONAL flavor of the month is "true" Christianity -- whatever that could possibly mean with all the freedom to "interpret" things. But the negative golden rule is a good thing to govern your actions with all those that are different from you including the other Christians, the ones like Kristjen that you lump in with the atheists as destined for the barbecue pit because they cannot quite bring themselves to accept the literal truth of Genesis in the face of all the evidence that it is not true.

So please, let the Muslims be Muslims as long as they don't try to create a Muslim society with their personal ethos and religion enforced by law or legal sanction or tax. Leave the Buddhists alone, and don't try to proselytize Christianity to them unless you want them to proselytize right back on the importance of meditation and Enlightenment and the silliness of accepting any particular religious mythology. Accept the fact that atheists have reasons -- good ones, bad ones, their own -- for being atheists.

If you can actually get to where you can really be tolerant of them, tolerant enough to listen to what they have to say without feeling threatened, wise enough to support your own beliefs with something beyond "it says it in this book and so it is true", then you can dig right in on this list and hold actual conversations.

rgb

P.S. I'm still waiting for objective references regarding 100 million Christians murdered by atheists for their faith. If you've looked for them and not found them and reconsidered the point, you might edit your original post and acknowledge the mistake so that you don't perpetuate misinformation on the web, something searchable by Google that might lead people to believe that it is true when it is not.

P.P.S. -- I'm also waiting for a credible response from you or anyone else regarding the general methodology of radioactive dating of rocks, ice cores, and so much more, on the remarkable coincidence that all the different clocks are different (sometimes very different) in their basic mechanism and timescale and yet all provide a huge base of evidence for a universe that is billions of years old. Or is Genesis only "metaphorically" true, that is to say, false, that is to say, an error?

If you read my latest post on the atheist genocide thread, Tommy, you will get your clear-cut answer. You are operating under the assumption that your opinion is as good as mine, or anyone's, where it can be contradicted by evidence. That is not the case.

If you wish to believe in Jesus and the miracles of the New Testament, I will respectfully disagree because in my opinion the evidence is dubious, because historically miracles are often observed and believed in by the credulous only to be revealed as either natural phenomena (and no more or less miraculous than all of nature, which is already pretty miraculous as far as I'm concerned but not special) or worse, as open fraud, slight of hand, because I do not believe in "divine inspiration" as a source of truth about our Universe. I believe in using my head, my eyes, reason, not scriptural authority.

However, I cannot disprove those miracles any more than you can prove them, and if Occam's Razor, Russell's teapot argument, the Santa Claus metaphor I just posted on the atheist thread do not move you because you consider divine inspiration to trump reason and common sense, so be it.

Matters are quite different when you assert that the whole bible is true beyond doubt because of the divine inspiration argument. That is not correct. Like it or not, the bible is contradicted in many places, specifically in Genesis, by so much evidence that you'd have to study it a lifetime just to take in a small fraction of it. In fact, if you didn't have a supposedly inerrant bible telling you what to believe and you merely let the evidence speak for itself, you would never, ever, ever conclude that the Universe is 6000-10000 years old. In fact, you would (I'm sorry) laugh at anyone that made that claim, shaking your head at the supposedly grown person who still believed in the moral equivalent of Santa Claus in an age where we have sent ships to carve their way through the ice to sit on the north pole and -- no workshop.

Or, in my case, I'm not laughing at you (seriously), I'm trying to help you wake up, smell the coffee, and develop your capacity for critical thinking. You've got one, I'm certain of it. It may be tiny and underexercised, but if you give it a try, it will quickly grow strong.

So am I being "intolerant"? Sure. Intolerant of statements as fact that are contradicted by evidence, including the statement that the bible is inerrant, because as I have repeatedly shown, it contains portions that are overwhelmingly contradicted by a preponderance of evidence. You have to make up a separate story to explain each piece that contradicts the bible. Each story contains more pieces that are contradicted by evidence because face it, the current explanations are consistent and complex and intertwined, and you simply cannot go in and alter just this or just that to "rescue" your absurd counterhypothesis.

This proves that the bible contains serious errors in its core mythology, period. This in turn demonstrates that the creation myths, at least, are not "divinely inspired truth", and makes suspect all the supposedly divinely inspired truths that are based on the falsehoods in later books, the prophecies of all the prophets that somehow missed the fact that their fundamental mythology was flawed from the beginning.

The bible shows us a Universe consisting of a flat earth with a solid bowl ("firmament" means solid, after all) for a sky, a self-luminescent moon and sun that go underneath the plate of the earth as it rests on "the deeps" of a surrounding ocean, with a circular boundary. The bible claims that the stars are tiny lights in the sky that can be shaken down to the ground by earthquakes. The bible claims that there can exist mountains high enough to see all the cities of the world from their peak.

Then there were the miracles that might have mattered. Where is it written:

"And Jesus said, wash thy hands after going to the bathroom, as pestilence and plague are caused not by God's will as a punishment for sin but by tiny microbes that are passed among you, germs that can clearly be seen if you arrange two glass lenses in a certain way"?

That one miracle would have saved millions and millions of lives, prevented endless human suffering and misery, and provided a jim-dandy example of a divinely inspired truth given that was written in the absence of actually experimenting with lenses and figuring it all out.

Why isn't it written "And Satan took Jesus on a tour around the world, shewing him all the cities in the continents on the far side..."?

This one wouldn't have been that miraculous, as there were people alive even then that realized that the world was round (Eratosthenes had actually estimated its size correctly to within 10% by around 240 BCE). Unfortunately, the apostles were ignorant people and not divinely inspired enough to get this right.

So yeah,

a) The bible claims to be divinely inspired truth. You accept it as "truth beyond question" because of its supposedly divine origins and its self-asserted inerrancy, as if my saying "I'm right because I'm divinely inspired" makes me any righter.

b) I have shown, and will continue to show as long as you continue to post to the contrary, that it contains errors in fact that are directly contradicted by pretty much all the physical evidence in the Universe that we can see. Not one, single piece of the biblical creation myth is supported by one, single piece of objective evidence. Its time frame is contradicted by every single clock we have discovered. Its order of creation is contradicted by our observations of the time ordering in correlation with those clocks. Its cosmology is contradicted by every aspect of observational cosmology. It is as wrong as it can get. It is false, incorrect, not true, not approximately true, not a poetic or allegorical statement of truth, not correct in essence but incorrect in detail. It is less silly to "believe in Santa Claus" (who at least is connected to a legendary character who might possibly have lived) than it is to believe in the literal truth of the creation myth of Genesis. The only way Genesis could be true is if God is overtly supernatural, making and unmaking and remaking on a whim and a deliberate liar, creating the antarctic icepacks, the rocks, the moon, the light of the stars, and so much more with deliberately deceiving clocks, and it would take a hundred thousand ad hoc assertions to cope with all the contradictions with the data even then.

c) The bible is therefore not inerrant, nor is it consistently divinely inspired truth. Genesis stands as a clear proof that we must use our common sense, reason, and the evidence of the world to critically examine the bible to determine whether or not any part of it is in fact true or worthy of being accepted into our system of belief as contingent truth or possible truth.

This, Tommy, is called reason. It is Your Friend. In my opinion, it is God's one true gift to mankind, the thing that makes us to be "in His image" since imagining an anthropomorphic humaniform God is simply too silly for words.

Until you decide to use reason, you of course will persist in your belief that your opinion is as good as anyone else's, that I could be wrong "just as easily" as you could be wrong, that ultimately there is no objective way to determine truth, that scientific evidence is as subject to "interpretation" as the bible. This is incorrect.

I hope this answers your question quite thoroughly -- again. I am not a "true believer" in anything at all but the process of reason itself, and there I understand the process where you refuse to even try, where you have openly rejected it in previous posts. If your beliefs and reason are in conflict, your beliefs win. Period.

Too bad.

rgb

Tommy -

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you..the weekends tend to get away from me...we are always so busy, especially when we have scouts as I am one of the leaders…

Now..to your viewpoints on gay marriage...Let me begin by saying that associating terrorist attacks and the option of gay marriage is just ludicrous. It is a silly stand to take to say that if we were (hypothetically) to allow gays and lesbians to enter into a legally binding commitment that is comparable to marriage (I do not care what we call it) that it could cause us to mar our global reputation. I think that we are already doing a good job at that. Which reputation are you speaking of? Are you by chance speaking of the reputation that we have of not being able to take care of our elderly citizens? Or the reputation that we have of our politicians not being able to keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Or maybe the reputation that we have of not being able to keep illegal citizens out and add to that that then screw our taxpayers as we support said illegals. Hmmm...or maybe the reputation that we have of throwing our dollars to everyone outside of the United States before giving jobs to those citizens that so desperately need them. Or maybe the reputation of not ensuring that all of our children have healthcare…or maybe the reputation that we make our higher education costs so high that many are just not able to afford to go…so exactly which reputation are we talking about hurting here? We may be one of the most powerful countries in the world…maybe we should pony up and show the remainder of the world how to do it right?? Because right now…well let’s just say there are a lot of things that we leave to be desired. Soo if we are so worried about the terrorist attacks being caused by allowing gays and lesbians to marry..they why are they not bothering Canada?? Hmm..maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with gay marriage at all…

What are some countries that I can name that allow some sort of gay marriage or legal union without looking them up? Well…the Netherlands...Canada….Belgium…Spain…and I believe that although marriage is not an option in France, Sweden, and Iceland…they do allow some form of a civil union…those are some that I know off the top of my head…

Now…you say that laws are not based solely on the legality of them…no..but they still must be in accordance with that silly little piece of paper called the Constitution of the United States. Hmmm..imagine that. And by barring gay marriage or by defining marriage to be between a man and a woman, well, we begin to mess with that silly ol’ paper! Granted..laws are also usually based on the social norms…but that does not negate the fact that they still must be legal.

I am surprised that you have not thought more about this and taken a more adequate position…Our already somewhat soiled reputation and possible terrorist attacks are NOT the route to go on this one…

That reminds me, Robert, I have a question for you!

You say that I'm being intolerant (which I am), but you are doing the exact same thing. I've asked this question several times without any clear-cut answer. How is what I'm doing any different from what you're doing? You are asserting that I might be right and I might be wrong, but I should accept that it's the same with everybody else. I'm asserting that there is only one right way. How is my intolerance anything less than yours? And when you say that "true believers" are a danger, are you including yourself? Because you have to believe in something (even if it is nothing). So I guess, in that sense, we're all a danger to society.


"As I said, few things in this world are more dangerous than a "true believer", especially ones like you and Squiggles who see nothing incongruous about joining the army to fight in Iraq or persecuting gays -- and being an ideal Christian. Good job!"

Well, I'm not persecuting gays, I just cannot and will not abide the behaviour. (Another discussion apart from this post) But anyways, thanks for the compliment! Even though I don't persecute gays. (I actually know several, and am on friendly terms with the majority of them. I have nothing against the people, only the behaviour).

That's a really, really good one. "We must ban homosexual marriage to avoid another 9/11".

I put it right up there with "I shouldn't draw cartoons of Mohamed because somebody's religion -- not my own -- prohibits it".

Wow, how to choose between them. America "ruining its reputation" (Tommy, we have no reputation save as a greedy bully in Muslim countries. There is nothing to ruin.) or simply ignoring the bill of rights, which IS America.

I know, let's destroy America by trashing its constitution and the bill of rights, save its "reputation", ban being rude to people because we consider it extreme to impose "death sentences" on people who disagree with some religion and mock them by disagreeing! Heck, let's throw people in jail for "desecrating" an object and make it yet another graven idol -- throw in flag burning while we're at it.

Jefferson lived in vain.

rgb

Dear Georgia:

From a purely legal standpoint, without thinking about religion or society, I would say that there is no reason to ban homosexual marriage.

However, our laws are not based purely on legality, are they? Many, many factors come into the decision, therefore, we must take these factors into consideration. Factors such as society, the state's religious affiliation (lol, yeah right), and even the state's reputation among other countries.

America, as the world's leading superpower, must keep up its reputation. If not, there will be increased terrorist attacks (such as 9/11). This is the reason why we went to war in Afghanistan and (I believe) in Iraq. How many countries can you name that have legalized homosexual marriage (without searching for them)? A handful out of a world-full.

Apart from that, America is supposedly a Christian nation (which it really isn't, but that's another discussion). It will ruin its reputation for America to legalize homosexual marriage. Many, many nations with radical affliations will mock America as hypocritical (which would be true), thus would lead to increased attacks.

Do you want another 9/11?

Tommy -

LOLOL...you have no idea how many times that I have used the arguement when it comes to Christianity AND Gay Marriage, "I can say that I am a teapot, that does NOT make me a teapot"...so I found your 'bird' arguement quite funny...

Sooo..I have yet to meet more than a number of people that I can count on ONE hand that actually walk the walk when they talk the Christian talk...so forgive me a bit if I am a bit disallusioned by Christians...now...I am NOT ASKING you to agree with homosexuality...I could care less if you agree with it...but our nation is built on laws...it is built on a fundamental document - the Constitution....the fact that these morons up on Capitol Hill actually though that it was ok to propose a Constitutional Ammendment to BAN gay marriage is beyond me...because that in itself goes AGAINST the Constitution...now...let us look at this solely from a legal standpoint (let us remove our spiritual beliefs from this arguement...because we are talking about government where fundamentally we shall not make any laws based on religion) sooo...if we look at this from solely a legal viewpoint...please tell me (with religion NOT playing a part in it) where it is wrong to allow gay marriage?

(FYI - this is kind of a trick question..lol)

Georgia

Robert said: Thus demonstrating beyond any measure of doubt that "Bible-believing Christians" are much more interested in imposing their view of right and wrong on everybody else -- including all of those who happen to be born gay -- than they are in being tolerant of people whose beliefs differ from their own.

Umm ... not entirely true, unless you are using the quotations to differentiate a specific interpretive tradition as the ONLY members of your subject.

The problem with this is the concept that imposing a moral framework on society is specifically a religious activity, when in all probability it is a human social norm that may frequently be re-enforced by religion (and not just the specific religion you have referenced). Majorities within any group have rarely been known as 'tolerant,' especially on matters which they believe impact them ... To make this even more problematic, many people erroneously associate tolerance with acceptance or acknowledgement of legitimacy. In other words, you are not really intolerant simply because you believe a different belief is in error; you become so when you actively work to punish such beliefs simply on the grounds that they are different without any demonstrable evidence that behaviors linked to these beliefs are detrimental to society as a whole. Some of that debate is unavoidably tied into the ability of a society to define itself; typically using a social and moral framework identified by the majority. The more homogenous the group or society is, the more rigid the framework tends to be.

To put it more simply ...

Everybody is interested in determining what is right and what is wrong. Typically they are only 'tolerant' when they lack the political power impose their own views or internal moral code on others. This behavior is not limited to "Bible-believing Christians."

Most, if not all, Christians profess/believe the Bible to be true; however, there is a wide range of specific interpretations (literal, figurative, contextual, etc.) among them with respect to many moral judgments that make any blanket statement tenuous ... Homosexuality is one of these.

Tolerance should not imply acceptance of differing beliefs as equally valid. It is possible to tolerate error without ignoring the fact that it is actually an error.

Georgia, most of the people in political power are NOT Christian. They may say they are, but their actions prove otherwise. I can say that I'm a bird all I want, but that doesn't make me a bird. This is, perhaps, something that we cannot agree on. I can't allow homosexual marriage. period.

Tommy -

Well...hmm...how do I go about this politely...America is a democratic country that has a Constitutional Ammendment that states that there shall be no law made respecting any religion...if it were solely up to our...ahem.."President" there would be a ban on gay marriage...the fact is, that our government is set up to hopefully not allow exactly such a thing, thank goodness...that does no detract that most of those in political power ARE Christian...but thankfully we have the checks and balances, and we have a Constitution to avoid having a situation occur as it was in England which is what caused our American ancestors to come over here. There is no reason that gays and lesbians should NOT be allowed to get married legally...I would never say that the Church should allow it..but legally there is no reason to not allow it other than the complete stupidity of those that comprise the political platform of America. Yes..I do not say ignorance..it is stupidity...especially if they go so far as to even consider a Constitutional Ammendment to ban it...then they have already said 'screw the 10th ammendment'...but I will try NOT to go into this any further for the moment...

You know Robert, you're getting on me and Squiggles because of our beliefs. How is that any different from persecuting gays (which is not what I'm doing. I'm persecuting the behaviour, not the people.)? And yes, I do want to go fight in Iraq. Not because I want to kill Muslims, but because I want to protect my family and friends. I want to fight the terrorists on their doorstep instead of on my doorstep. Besides, if it wasn't for the American Military, there wouldn't be a Duke University for you to teach at. We would still be just another colony of the British Throne, without freedom of religion and such things.