Post by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobPost by defaultOn Mon, 31 Dec 2018 06:47:23 -0600, Christopher A. Lee
Post by Christopher A. LeePost by a***@gmail.comPost by m***@gmail.comPost by a***@gmail.comI hope that myself, and my friends, followers, and allies find happiness in the afterlife if there is one. Wether through rebirth or in heaven, or whatever happens in reality.
Abhinav Lal
Writer & Investor
Followers? Is this aaa posting through an Indian ISP? He said he was moving
back to the US, but did he?
I am only about 95% atheist. There is a chance of life after death.
How so?
Post by a***@gmail.comhope that I have an eternal soul, and find happiness wherever and whenever
I am. The same for my friends, followers, and allies.
Why even consider one?
And what friends? You ere whining that you don't have any.
What followers?
What allies?
Atheist/theist is binary. Either you believe in gods or you don't.
That's what the "a-" prefix does.
This idiot seems to be just another religious troll and thinks he's
being clever about it.
95% atheist indeed!
I don't see anything wrong with putting a confidence level
on one's opinion. "I'm 95% certain that ghodz are baloney"
would be something I'd say. i have put myself at 6.99999...
(repeating decimal) on the "Dawkins scale" of atheism, aka
the "Spectrum of theistic probability."
Why even give them a thought?
But atheism per se is still binary - either one is a theist or one
isn't.
But it would never occur to me to say that "ghodz are baloney" except
possibly in response to what some theist says to me - and what I would
say depends on what the theist said.
Same here. My "baloney" response is usually used when someone
else demands I account for the possibility that ghodz exist,
because "You can't prove there's no ghod."
Which is a dishonest copout, because we only ask for it in the vein of
"put up or shut up" after they talk about it as fact.
Do they seriously imagine that does either?
Post by KevrobI can't prove the room I'm sitting in won't, in the next 10
seconds, have all the atmosphere in it evacuate into the hallway,
so that we all suffoccat, either. From what we now about the
ohysics of gasses, that's exceedingly unlike;y, though.
Post by Christopher A. LeeBecause to me, they're merely somebody else's wacky belief - and I
wouldn't know how wacky if they had the intelligence to keep them
where they belong.
Theists like to "define" us according to what they imagine we would
say, but they don't put it in context - we don't say it unprompted.
And they imagine this is the be-all and end-all of our POV with
respect to something that has no relevance outside their religion.
It's a form of quote-mining.
It's like opening a conversation with "I don't take cream or sugar in
my coffee".
[quote]
Ignosticism or igtheism...
the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless
because the term god has no coherent and unambiguous definition. It may
also be described as the theological position that every other
theological position (including agnosticism and atheism) assumes too
much about the concept of god and many other theological concepts.
[/quote]
I don't like the word, because as soon as you start trying to define
different atheist positions, you will end up with almost as many as
there are atheists.
Part of the problem, is that the stupids can't grasp that it's simply
a demographic description sating that we're not something that a lot
of people are.
But they don't have a problem with other a- words constructed the same
way - asynchronous, asymmetric, apolitical, amoral, etc.
Post by Kevrobhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism
If I had been raised like you, and someone had asked me "do you
believe in ghod?" I imagine I'd have had to ask them to define
their terms.
As far as I'm concerned, it's just plain rude to talk about religious
doctrines as if they were fact, and as if they applied to people they
know don't believe in the first place - whether it's their
god/Jesus/etc or their strictures on matters of conscience.
Post by KevrobThat's what makes the idea, if not the name, of ignosticism
interesting to me. It defies the commonly accepted notion that
everyone has an idea of ghod, and enough in common to discuss it.
When i took philosophy in school, one thin they drummed into us
was that terms had to be nivocal withing an argument. Equivocation
is a fallacy. If two people are discussing "god" and they use two
definitions that are different enough, they aren't talking about the
same thing, at all. The yahooey of the Jews, the Christian trinity,
the Hindu major trio and assorted minor ghodz, the Olympians, "the
ground of being, the Muslims' Ollie, the Deists' disinterested ghod -
these are all wildly or just subtly different.
Even among different denominations of the same religion.
Post by KevrobI'd be happy if the religionists spent a feew thousand years hashing
out the issue of which ghod(z) "really" exist, and their actual qualities,
before they bothered us non-belivers about the one(s) they can agree on.
Thousands? Who am I kidding. They won't get that done before the
heat death of the universe. :)
Post by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobGrowing up in a Catholic family in he mid-late 20the century USA,
the ghod-idea permeated society, so that, for the majority, it was
a "default condition," even though, philosophically speaking, it
ought not be.
I had something like that in the 1950s. My parents were atheist, and
on one side it went back to before Darwin went on his voyage. They
simply never mentioned religion. and it never occurred to me why some
of the kids I played with in the park weren't there on Sunday (one or
two on Saturday).
I was eight when the subject was first introduced, and I still
remember trying to explain to my stupid teacher why "who created all
this, then" was a ridiculous question which rested on the presumption
that it took somebody to do it - because it had never occurred to me,
and she could not justify it using my life experience.
I take it this was in a public school, just before the Supreme
Court struck down prayer organiozed by such units of local government?
To this day their are public school teachers who don't get that
"witnessing" isn't part of their job description.
It was in England, where the laws are different.
The only way to get the CofE on board the 1947 Education Act was to
make CofE religious assembly and education mandatory unless parents
opted out - which they did if they were Jewish, Catholic, etc.
There wasn't actual religious assembly in my primary school for the
first few years, just "hands together, eyes closed" which I thought
was a silly game, which got me into minor trouble and I never
understood why. Also silly stories which meant nothing to me. It
wasn't until I was eight that I had a teacher who made a fuss about
expecting these to be taken seriously.
And that's when Realised that some adults, even teachers, were
complete idiots and not to be trusted. To me, everything was just
"school" and I couldn't tell the difference between being expected to
believe her god stuff and anything else.
So I went from being the class prodigy to the disruptive one who kept
asking questions to see if she knew what she was talking about. Which
she didn't in too many areas, and earned me visits to the educational
psychiatrist - who told my parents that he sided with me and
understood completely why I'd reacted the way I did.
When the rest of the class trooped off to assembly, I was "excused" it
and went to a room where there was a very interesting teacher who
discussed interesting things. The same thing happened with the
religious instruction classes.
I didn't like being "excused" when I hadn't done anything wrong - to
me "esc use me" was what you said after you farted, to ask people's
forgiveness and I hadn't done anything that needed forgiving.
Post by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeeWhen this troll keeps bringing it up, it's clearly important to him,
and he wrongly imagines it is for the rest of us.
Post by Kevrobhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability
I am confused about "I don't believe in a ghod, but I hope
I'm wrong." Sometimes one hopes for cosmic justice one has
no confidence will ever exist. I've used, "There's no hell,
but for guys like (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc) we should build
one and send them there." It's not a serious wish.
He's stuck in a Christian-monotheist type of god-belief. Not even the
Hindu one that you might suspect from his name and the country of his
ISP. Let alone any of the other equally unjustified types.
And he imagines we should know exactly what he means, which one and
what its attributes are.
I have joked, when invited to Protestant worship services, that
I'm an ex-Catholic, and it makes me uncomfortable to be proselytized
by the 'heretics." The "true church" to not go to is the RCC! :)
Like the old joke about Northern Ireland.... "but are you a Catholic
atheist or a Protestant atheist".
Which was a bit like something that my Lady friend was asked. She's a
Catholic, dark-skinned Indian whose mother was from Kerala at the
Southern tip and whose father was from Uttar Pradhesh (North of Delhi)
where people are lighter, and she inherited her mother's colouring but
not as dark...
"Are you black or white?"
"I'm Indian. We don't have black and white."
"But are you a black Indian or a white Indian?"
Incidentally, she, her family and her friends give the lie to the
accusation here that I hate all things religious when theist trolls
cannot address responses.
Post by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobPost by Christopher A. LeePost by KevrobI wish I were immortal, but I also wish the Guardians of the
Universe would pick me to be the holder of the battery and
power ring for sector 2814. That's not going to happen, either.
Much of the problem atheism has in appealing to people is its
insistance on dealing with reality without crutches like an
afterlife and final judgment of people's lives. We have no
expectation of "well done, thou good and faithful servant."
We die, case closed.
Most theists can't get their minds around this. So they imagine we
have the same concerns that they were brainwashed to have, which the
religion they were brainwashed to believe conveniently answers.
Much of that early conditioning can re-emerge, if one has a trauma,
or is under sedation, and your conscious mind is pushed out of the
"driver's seat." I'm afraid all who were raised like I was are in
danger of reverting, should dementia kick in. If I'm calling for
a priest on my deathbed, that will probably be why.
It would never occur to me because I didn't have that conditioning.
When I was close to death with a critical lung condition in the 2000s,
my main concern was that I would never see my loved ones again -
family, Special Lady who lived on the other coast and whom I'd fly to
see her regularly, cats (they're people too), etc.
It totally pissed me off when people said I should thank the god of
somebody else's religion, when it was the skill of the doctors and
nursing staff, coupled with modern medical technology.
It is such an insult to call the results of all that study, training
and skill "a miracle." It would be a "miracle" if the result was
achieved WITHOUT all that very real human effort. Yahooey and
Josh are credit hogs - "All Glory To God." When I was in school, kids
were encouraged to head their papers with initials such as "JMJ" for
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph" or AMDG, which is "Ad maiorem Dei gloriam"
a Latin tag translated as "For the greater glory of God." That's
the Jesuit motto.
It's a variant of the survivor syndrome. The sample is seriously
skewed because only the people who get to survive could say or think
that.
And you never hear anybody say "Thank God he killed all those other
people".
Post by Kevrobhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_maiorem_Dei_gloriam
Ego sum humana cogitandi - I am a thinking human.
:-)
I used to respond to a Catholic poster who would end his posts with
Latin church saying, with "Dominos pizza cum pepperoni et anchovisque"
to take the piss.
But I did five years of Latin between eleven and sixteen. At that time
it was a requirement for Oxford and Cambridge, possibly a few other
top universities as well, so that any kid who planned on going to
university took it.
Even though it's a dead language, it has been very useful in
understanding several modern languages even if I don't speak them, not
to mention the "archaeology" and migration from a common Indo-European
ancestor tongue and an even earlier proto- Indo-European language that
has been theorised and even back-tracked from modern and historical
ones.
Its strict grammar has also meant that I spoke more grammatical
English, although I am getting a bit slack these days.