JackC
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Everything posted by JackC
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To me spirituality is a meaningless concept, that's why I have no interest in it. It's got nothing to do with the fact that science actually explains things and is quite useful; pretty much everything religion isn't.
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Truly the end of an era. RIP Harry.
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I offer personal testimony. It does not bother me if you are not interested. It is your choice. There's a retired diplomat in Nigeria who wants to get $67 million out of the country and needs your bank account details help. It's your choice. Some things need evidence before they can be believed.
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Look, knock off the condecending attitude. It's not big or clever.
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I've ordered a Vector that will come with the Spectra reserve rip cord. If the thing works at it is supposed to, I can't see much of a downside except the possibility of chafing inside the housing that could not be seen from an external inspection. If the pin will not pass through the housing, is it possible to remove the ripcord from the housing for inspection purposes? Or can you only see as much as you can pull through each end?
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As far as I'm concerned, logic is subordinate to science. Like it or not, we live in the empirical world and if philosophy and logic cannot tell me anything truthful about the empirical world then engaging in it is nothing more than mental masturbation, of no practical use whatsoever. I don't care what your theory is, if it doesn't match experiment it's wrong.
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Let's not.
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If logic were empirically shown to be wrong, would it be changed? If you answer no, logic can prove nothing of consequence. If you answer yes, logic is based on empiricism.
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No you didn't. You just regurgitated one of the axioms. Isn't your whole premise that you can't prove anything in the empirical universe?
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Neither have you apparently. Wrong. Mathematics and logic are both axiomatic systems and thereby fundamentally based on assumptions. Look up Gödel's incompleteness theorems for example. You say that science can't "know" anything because it is based on the empirical universe and you can't know if that is real. This logic also applies to logic itself, since logic is also rooted in the empirical universe and you can't know if that is real.
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No but faith, the ability to hold a belief without any supporting evidence, makes the religious particularly easy targets.
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I'm not anti philosophy, it's just that your argument boils down to "ultimately we can't know anything" which is a revealation of neither use nor ornament. But the irony is that your philosophy (if true) must also apply to itself. And with that, anything you think you know has to dissapear into a puff of your own logic.
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Other than for a bit of philosophical masturbation, what difference does it make if there is a hidden reality behind empirical reality? You can't see it, you can't detect it in any way, you can never know anything about it and it is completely indistinguishable from it's own non-existance. Postulating such a thing doesn't get you anywhere, it explains nothing, it proves nothing, you have no evidence for it, you have no reason to suggest such a thing. Why waste time trying to trap scientists with such semantic weaseling? The only possible use I can see for this is as an inflatable philosophical cosh (all hot air and very little substance) to try and bash empiricists with.
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If there exists a thing that doesn't interact with the empirical universe, then there is no way we could ever know anything about it since everything we know about anything is via the empirical universe. Naive or not, for all practical purposes the empirical universe is the actual universe.
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Let us know when people can democratically ammend the contents of the Bible. How is this even a valid comparison?
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I disagree. All knowledge derived through our perceptions is axiomatic to some extent, we must accept this as another axiom (oh the irony). In maths we must take the axiom that 1=1 before we can even start. With science we take the axiom that empiricism will tell us something about the empirical world we live in. But it is not unreasonable or naive to do so since our world unvaryingly appears to be empirical. Even if there is a hidden unempirical reality behind our empirical reality, that is somewhat irrelevant since science only tells us about the working of the observable, empirical universe; no more and no less than it is expected and designed to do. Scientists are not naive of the assumptions they make.
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If religosity is not an emotion, then it should be independent of the person experiencing it. There should be some kind of physical religiosity field I can stand in, or a religosity particle I can detect, or some external thing that can be used to affect religosity in some way that differentiates it from an emotion. Is there any other non-emotional corollary that is proven to exist that can be detected only by people who believe in it and not by people who don't? Or you could have absolutely no reason to postulate this at all which makes it nothing more than a blind guess that is neither supported by any evidence or even fits with what evidence there is. But that would be very unlike you.
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I'm inclined to largely agree, although MBTI has at least had a half-arsed basis in reality and similar MBTI personalities do tend to identify with certain professions etc whereas Tarot is complete bollox from top to bottom.
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So what's your point? That religosity/spirituality is an emotion? I'd go along with that and still say religion is of no benefit to modern society whatsoever.
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Actually, I think you probably could test to see how friendly people are. I'm fairly sure things like the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator is an attempt to do something very much like that. And I can't weigh gravity but I can detect its effect on other objects. Ergo gravity is indistinguishable from it's own non-existence. Or gravity is an emotion. I think you could go either way with an analogy as loose (and useless) as this one.
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You can't distinguish love, friendship and loyalty from their own non-existence?
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From a hopeful point of view, the lottery has infinitely better odds. From a cynical point of view, religion is one hell of a good motivator for a nice, long, bloody war.
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Eh? For all practial purposes, god is indistinguishable from it's own non-existence. So from a pragmatic point of view, all religions are equally useless.
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>Is light a wave or a particle? Neither, it's a quantum particle >Is that cat alive or dead? Which cat? >What is the position and energy of that neutron? 3.7 and 14.5. Position and momentum would have been harder.
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You have to wonder exactly where faith gets you though, seeing as by definition it is a belief without evidence. It's basically guessing for the unimaginative.