I don't know, man. I remember all the sharpest super-twinks I know declaring that in 3.0 druid was either the flat-out toughest or in the running for toughest class (depending on who you asked), and 3.5 made them tougher.
Maybe I've played them wrong, or something, but I've never gotten that sense. For starters the druid is almost always the party healer, so you're using all your actions to heal the fighter instead of anything else. Wild shape is almost always useless, because the animals you can take the shape of invariably have lower AC and less-damaging attacks than just you in regular form. And it takes a feat slot to be able to cast spells in wild shape. Other than that it's just another kind of sneaking, like taking the form of a hawk to spy on bad guys or whatever.
By the time you can cast Bull's Strength it won't make up for not having a fighter's BAB progression, nor does Bear's Endurance make up for having to allocate points into Wisdom and Charisma instead of dumping everything into Strength and Constitution like the fighter can do. (And you should be casting those spells on him instead, anyway.)
Add to that the severe armor and weapon restrictions - the spear is the most damaging weapon you can wield - and the bookkeeping issues involved in animal companions and summoned monsters that make them such a hassle to use effectively you don't generally even bother and it's hard for me to see druids as especially twink-worthy. I mean compared to the fighter/rogue spiked-chain tripmaster, druids don't even bear mentioning.
But, I'm not a very experienced twink. Maybe somebody can explain how it's done with druids.
Some of it for me is certainly in resource management, which from the rest of your post is something I can tell you don't particularly enjoy.
I like it just fine right up to the point where it ends the adventure for everybody else at the table. They're certainly not getting rid of resources, by any means; if you haven't already you should play with the Book of the Nine Swords material to get a sense of what it's going to be like. That sense of managing resources and preparing abilities is still there, but my swordsage doesn't have to guess what he's going to need for a whole day's worth of adventuring - and he's not in desperate need of 8 hours of rest after only four battles - but he still has resources he needs to manage, and the choice to prepare one maneuver means that another can't be used when it really would have mattered.
I really like the variety of having some characters in a group that are on a fairly even keel of power where others have only a few moments of greatness throughout a day (often, many fights) that they have to carefully hoard and marshal at appropriate times.
If you're the second guy, though, you may not understand how the first guy feels. Maybe he's not as excited by the idea of doing nothing more than hitting with his 1d12 greataxe every round while everybody at the table cheers when the wizard picks up ten d6's for fireball damage. Sure, monopolizing the show-off power is good if you're the guy who gets to have it, but there's 2-4 other people at the table, and they'd like a chance to show off once in a while, too. "Ol' reliable greataxe damage" isn't much fun when the wizard is bending reality to his very whim, as much fun as that is for you.
Nonetheless, if you want to play a character with reliable, constant power, I don't think that's going anywhere.
I like that there are a ton of feats and spells and things in the game that are combat-important but don't deal damage, such as sleep or entangle.
Not going anywhere, and they're adding mechanisms for non-combat encounters, like social encounters. So I don't think you have anything to fear, there.
I like that you can play a wide variety of characters that all feel/play really different.
I can't imagine that's going anywhere, either. Book of the Nine Swords gets maligned sometimes as "spells for fighters" but that's really not at all what it's about; ultimately, there's not much difference from the martial maneuvers in B9S and using a feat like Whirlwind Strike.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, but everything I know so far about 4E suggests that some of these things are going outright and others are being diminished in importance severely, and that we're moving more to a game where everyone's got a bunch of 'once per encounter' abilities, and every fight of their career involves every character firing off their toughest ones in succession.
I just don't get that sense. It certainly isn't that way in 3e now, wizards don't blow their toughest spells one after another in the same order for the day's encounters, and it certainly doesn't work that way in B9S, where you really have to set yourself or the situation up to get the best use out of your per-encounter power or you've wasted it. And there's still a daily-use power system, too; it's just not that every power is per-day. In 3e running out of per-day powers, like spells, is the end of the delve. Period. In 4e it sounds like running out of per-day powers doesn't leave you so powerless.
Things like: pushing more to an 'everyone does damage' model vs. non-damaging malediction/battlefield control, or designing classes more along the MMORPG 'holy trinity' of tank/healing/DPS.
The healing/tank/DPS was already in Dungeons and Dragons, though; that's why it's in so many fantasy video games. And honestly, tanking and DPS'ing are fun, and they should be in the game just like they've always been. Healing isn't much fun at the table-top, and the
Since based on what I've heard so far, not one of these is actually happening
You must not be listening, then, since they're actually doing every single thing you mentioned in your list.
1) Grapple and other complicated rules are being totally revamped, though they haven't said how.
2) Static bonuses to stats are pretty much out - not from spells, not from magic items. That leads to...
3) Since magic items no longer provide static benefits to stats, you no longer have to have stat-improving magic items just to keep up with the "standard" power curve. No more Amulets of Natural Armor +2 or whatever. Gone. Good riddance. Characters should be heroes because they're heroic, not because they're weighed down with stat-improving gear. (On the other hand, some characters are heroes because of magic swords, or what have you, but the Weapon of Legacy mechanic is, in my games, how I plan to deal with that in 4th edition. Somehow.)
4) Every level, some choice to make - some feat or power or spell to choose, instead of 2 levels out of three simply recording a new BAB, saves, and HP.
5) I don't know the playtesters, but it's hard to imagine anybody but twinks wanting to work at WoTC in the first place, so I think they have that one covered.
So, have a little optimism. They're covering this stuff. Listen to their podcast or something.
... who feels like they may have simplified the most interesting parts clear out of the game, filled the gaps liberally with WoW, and ended up with a game that, admittedly, has a much lower barrier to entry but is also not particularly interesting?
Neither of us know what the mechanics are going to be like, but from my perspective you couldn't be more wrong. I don't know specifically what you're talking about when you say "the most interesting parts", but the parts that they've confirmed aren't there anymore are the parts that always bothered me the most - like the way any dungeon adventure longer than four encounters stops being "let's go have adventures" and becomes "we need to find a way to sleep."
I mean, my idea of heroic fantasy doesn't include a desperate search for a Motel 6 (or, God forbid, a magic spell that simply creates one.) So the new spellcasting mechanic of "at-will" powers sounds pitch-perfect to me. But, at the same time, a few of the powers are attrition-based, too, so having to decide whether or not to blow your big spells now or save them for something even more tough is still there.
The more I hear about 4th Edition the more I wish it was the D&D I was running right now. As it is, every single one of my players now has at least one maneuver , if not their class or PrC, from Book of the Nine Swords - which is sort of prototype 4th Edition in some ways - and I think that speaks volumes. My players don't even want to sleep in dungeons, that's how stupid it feels to play that way, and they've all, independently, gravitated to ways to keep the power level up without using attrition powers.
I don't know what it means to "fill the gaps liberally with WoW", except as far as WoW simply game-ified what players and DM's were already doing. Maybe you could elaborate on that.
I can't choose how the government uses the chunk of my income that it takes.
Yeah, you're right. If only there was some month, say November, when we could actually choose the people who would make up the government and therefore influence the process by which our taxes were spent.
Oh, wait.
Remember "no taxation without representation"? The problem for you is that the converse is also true.
Why the hell would a rational person give more money to an organization known for being bloated and inefficient?
Compared to what, exactly? People who complain about the ineffectiveness of government always seem to forget the Post Office. I can mail a letter for about 30 cents, and sending the same letter with either UPS or FedEx costs at least 3 dollars. Plus the Post Office picks it up at my home without me even telling them to come around. There's a hell of a lot less waste in the government than there is in corporate America.
Which is a different argument entirely. I was saying that it is rational to believe in God, and that a rational, scientifically-minded person cannot be faulted for believing in God, since the two are quite compatible.
But it's not at all a different argument. There's only one reason for a rational person to believe in something - it's truth. It's rational to believe in that which one has concluded is true. It's irrational, by definition, to believe in that which one knows to be false.
The argument about whether or not God actually exists and whether or not it's rational to believe in God is the exact same argument. They're the same thing, because to believe in something for any other reason than its veracity is irrational, by definition.
You're missing the point in that it that the truth value of the proposition "God exists" is not known, though there are reasonable arguments both for and against it.
You're missing the point, though, that you're wrong. The truth value of that proposition can be decided, and has been, because there are no reasonable arguments for it, only against it. The only arguments put forth in support of that proposition have all turned out to be wrong.
Hence, atheism.
Certainly if it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to all people that God exists, then only fools would not believe in God, and vice versa.
You keep missing the fact that that vice versa is the situation we're in; and no, you don't have to be a fool to believe in God, even intelligent people fall for delusions.
Because if one side of the debate had 100% proof, it wouldn't be much of an argument.
And yet we see thousands of arguments in the public discourse where one side has 100% proof and yet, there's another side. Abstinence-based education in schools. Supply-side economics. People who deny the Holocaust. People who think the moon landing was a hoax. Creationism.
You seem to ignore the capacity of human beings to ignore evidence and proof, yet that's the characteristic most associated with religion. With faith. The simple fact is that having 100% proof is hardly sufficient to end most arguments because you can always find irrational people who want to argue with you.
With the caveat that at least that happiness and internal peace is one of the things promised by Christianity, and which it does seem to deliver.
Hardly, hence atheists. And of course every religion has the power to deliver relative happiness and "internal peace", usually by making nonbelievers as unhappy as possible. That's hardly a reason for a reasonable person to make a decision about what is true. That's how unreasonable people make decision, by definition.
The evidence is unclear.
No, it's not. The evidence is actually very clear that it does nothing at all for colds, and therefore the decision to spend $10 on echinacea is inherently unreasonable, because it's known to be a waste of money. And even if there was no evidence whatsoever, the idea that both alternatives are equally rational is nonsense, as the example of the Alpha Cenauri teapot proves.
God forbid that profits might for once be kept by the people who created it
God forbid that the people and entities that benefit from public works be expected to contribute some portion to their upkeep.
I suppose you think that it's just fine to skip out on the check, too - if the restaurant wants to get paid for their meal they shouldn't have windows in the men's room, right?
Your milk example shows that you believe in the logical fallacy that absence of evidence is that same as evidence of absence.
It's a fallacy in the same way that science is circular reasoning, and it says a lot more about the impotence of logic to fail to apprehend obvious truths than anything else.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That's how absence is detected. That's how you know how to go out for more milk. You've internalized the lie that that's bad reasoning, but clearly you still go out and buy milk when you're out, so you understand that regardless of logic's mistaken identification, you know it's good reasoning.
One statement by a person that you think it logically flawed is an inherent sign that all other statements must be considered suspect to the point of expecting the absurd response of claiming that something before their eyes is not as they see it.
Yes, exactly. After all it's right in front of their eyes that they're not Napoleon, too, but they don't seem to see it. They're not just wrong; they're crazy wrong. "Deluded" is the word we use for those people.
Not all wrong ideas rise to the level of delusion, but when someone clings to a position in spite of all the evidence of their senses, at some point you have to suspect their sanity. When someone is wrong there's only three possibilities - they're ignorant of something, they're lying, or they're insane. The Napoleon guy has been informed that he's wrong, so he's not ignorant. And the prsopect of being committed is scary enough for most people that we can assume he's not lying. Thus, he's insane.
That's why belief that one is Napoleon when one is not is a delusion, a recognized mental illness. And soon, the delusional belief in God will be recognized the same way. After all psychologists immediately recognized it as delusion when a group of anorexic girls created Ana, the Goddess of Anorexia; soon they'll recognize the delusion of the God of the Bible. And then you people can get the help you need.
You can't do it with everything.
I can do it with anything I want, in science. Surely you're familiar with the idea of a random representative sample?
You believe that everyone who thinks differently than you on matters of religion is a fundamentalist, a crazy, and incapable of moderation.
I don't believe it; I've observed it. Your own conduct here has been proof of it. Religion itself doesn't allow for moderation. How can a claim of absolute eternal truth be "moderated"? That's why it's so easy for fundamentalists to mock religious multiculturalism - it's risible. Religions make mutually contradictory claims of truth. They can't all be right. How can that be moderated?
Religious moderation is impossible, a priori. And as if that weren't enough, there's all the evidence of so-called "moderates" like you who are precisely every bit as dogmatic and inflexible as the "fundamentalists." There's really no difference between the two of you.
Why would all (but a select few) atheists spend every week reading something they consider an offensive fantasy?
Several reasons. One is to argue about it with believers. Another is that they became atheists as a result of reading the Bible, and finding its deep internal contradictions and sadistic portrayal of God to be so troubling that they reject the faith in toto. The truth is that the Bible is the cause of far more atheism than any other book, at least in America.
Two people can be very familiar with the text, to the point of being experts, and follow it very differently.
Words mean things. If the Bible can simply be interpreted to justify whatever conduct one wishes to, then you're not making a very good case for the particular veracity of the text.
If everyone was capable of interpreting the Bible the *exact* same way and applying it to situations in life that it never talked about in the *exact* same way, we wouldn't have hundreds of Christian denominations and off-shoots.
That's assuming they're reading it at all. As I've argued, that's generally not the case. A majority of Americans, predominatly Christians, for instance, think that the Bible says things like "God helps those who help themselves" and "cleanliness is next to godliness."
Your idea that Christians, in general, are familiar with the Bible simply doesn't hold water. And there's not any reason to believe that it's different for any other religion. People, like the internet, route around damage; that is, they "interpret" - read: ignore - inconvenient strictures when they're an obstacle to the life they want to live.
Read up on how many pro-life women have abortions - have regular abortions.
The believer is likely to be *more* familiar with the material. *More* is a RELATIVE TERM! Is this so freaking impossible to understand?
I understand it just fine. It's just not true. Why don't you get that yet?
This is the kind of stuff they cover in Sunday school, after all. What do you think people do at church in the mornings before the main worship service?
You're talking about a religion, friend, where it was more than 13 centuries before most churches had a Bible in a language the laity could even speak. Bible familiarity is not a characteristic of Christian belief, except for a few small sects that stress it. It's still the case that most members of mainstream churches hardly ever read it at all.
Children are born believing in Santa.
Practically, I said. And it's true. Who was the last child you had to tell about Santa Claus? Not the truth that he doesn't really exist, but the myth itself, to a child who had never even heard the name? Has that ever even happened to you? Sure, there's children who don't believe in him any more, but there certainly aren't any, at any age, in our society who've never even heard of him.
It is the concept of God, and only the concept of God only, the most perfect possible entity, whereby the definition alone lets us know it exists.
Nonsense. The way I've defined it, the perfect island is the most perfect entity that is also an island, and because "existence" is a property (or so its being defined) that you can't be perfect without, the definition alone by this reasoning means that the perfect island must exist. A putative island that exists is more perfect than one that does not, thus, the perfect island must exist, by definition.
But it doesn't. The reasoning doesn't work. You can't define things into existence. They exist, or they do not, regardless of humans defining things. It doesn't matter how much you define things as existing, or even as having to exist - nobody cares what you think has to exist.
As I said, there's arguments against it, but this isn't one of them.
The ontological overload is one of them. It emerged almost immediately because people saw how immediately ridiculous the ontological argument is. The ontological overload proves it, in a very intuitive fashion. That's why the ontological proof was so immediately dismissed by thinkers like Aquinas. You have to be some kind of idiot to think defining things makes them true in any way except for purposes of argument - like the axioms of logic.
And yet you are there in your body, and I am here in my body.
Right. Hardly noteworthy, just as its hardly any surprise that my eyes supply vision to my brain and your eyes supply vision from yours. It's hardly a surprise that my hand is attached to my arm and yours hands are at the ends of yours.
So to, it's equally unsurprising, to any but the most egotistical or dogmatic, that my brain does my consciousness, and your brain does yours. Whose else would it do?
No memory of course of your previous self, since you don't have the neurons for that, but even if you deny the reality of the consciousness, you must recognize the illusion of consciousness.
Then it can't be me, either, you've just proved it - it won't have the neurons for that, either. It'll be someone else - someone it does have the neurons for.
Do you exist?
Does my vision exist? If I go blind would it make sense to suggest that my vision could somehow be reborn in someone else's body?
No, of course not. Nobody can have my sense of humor if I lose it, either. It's gone, it doesn't go anywhere, it's simply obliterated.
As I will be. As you will be. I know it's scary but adults have to deal with it. Maybe it's time you did, instead of spinning comforting fables? Aren't we a little too old for security blankets?
I'm arguing that Christianity is a rationally coherent position, that there are good reasons to believe in God, and that it has pragmatic reasons as well.
But you don't seem to be arguing it's truth. At least, not here. I think that's noteworthy. You offer a great deal of criteria for belief but none of them are especially relevant - there's one reasonable criteria for taking a position or not, and that criteria is whether or not it's true.
Whether or not it makes you feel good is a rationale for children, for the immature, not for adults. Not for rational people. If you want to be a Christian because it makes you happy, regardless of its truth, you've given the game away. Comforting fictions are not rational. They're understandable, it's a common human weakness, but they're not rational.
Proposition / Counter-proposition, attacking premises, etc., is what argument is all about.
So I'm still waiting for the counter-propositions. You've simply dismissed legitimate rebuttals, which is what leads to my conclusion that you don't have any defense for your arguments.
So the point stands. There's no reasonable defense of belief in God; the only defenses are inherently dishonest or nonsensical, like the idea that uttering a definition brings something into being.
Your statement about Hawking is a good crack at it, but one can logically show the world had to have a beginning, which there's not really a good answer for.
But Hawkings answers it, which you'd know if you'd read his work. The problem has been addressed by science. Maybe you don't understand it yet, but that's hardly an objection.
It's not necessarily God, but the result of the logical argument rather resembles God in certain ways.
The God of the Bible? Hardly. Look, I guess you can append the word "God" on top of whatever you want - your sock drawer could be God if you felt the need to have a god to explain your socks - but that's hardly reasonable, either. Words mean things. To say "God" is to refer to a specific series of mythological ideas. Gods by definition are mythological, which puts a fairly substantial burden on those trying to promote their actual existence.
A burden not met by dictionary games like the ontological argument - which again has no support except among the dogmatic, who have no need for it anyway.
The concept of God is precisely unique in that the concept of God, and only of God, can one know is true simply because you understand the definition.
But you're wrong. The perfect island is defined precisely the same way. It has to be - it's perfect! Nonetheless, simply because I've defined it that way and told you the definition - and you've understood it, I hope - doesn't bring it into being. Understanding is not a process of creation; the universe doesn't care what you do or don't understand. Thus, the ontological "proof" is no proof at all. It's just a word-game.
Around 30 years, but who's counting?
Sourceless assertions.
Furthermore, the Christianity as Myth hypothesis fails for a variety of reasons....none of which you specify. Convincing, certainly.
"I believe Christianity is a myth, therefore Christianity is a myth."
But that's not how it is at all. I was a Christian when I came to know these things. "I believe Christianity is true, but the evidence convinces me that it's a myth." That's what it looks like when a reasonable person is convinced by evidence. Clearly you need an example.
Bad reasoning, on the other hand, never fails to raise my ire.
What, like this reasoning?
All of the atheists I know believe in something really bizarre, from ESP to aliens to being able to empathically talk to plants.
If you're going to unwittingly commit a fallacy of overgeneralization, color me not impressed by your vaunted reasoning skills. The simple fact is that you're prejudiced against atheists as a function of your religious delusions.
And I literally mean all of them.
Now you know one who doesn't. At best for you that's 99.9999% of atheists to 100% of theists. At worst for you, of course, you're completely wrong about the incidence of supernaturalism among skeptics and atheists.
Based on the only evidence we have, in fact, it seems more plausible than not that it might do so.
To the contrary; it seems highly improbable. We know that consciousness is what brains do, in the same way that vision is what eyes do. When a man goes blind we would find it highly risible to suggest that his vision had gone on to some afterlife, or had been "reborn" as the eyes of some infant. And despite the fact that we could construe it as "blindness - vision - bl
If you don't think you have one, then you're just a tool.
I have a hard time taking seriously the argument that I'm a tool when you're quoting CS Lewis.
Secondly, the answer, which you missed, was that something timeless had to be the answer.
Timeless/= God.
The universe cannot be infinitely old; it must have had a beginning.
You need to acquaint yourself with the work of Stephen Hawking on this subject. Closed timelike curves essentially obviate the need for the "universe's beginning" or any "timeless creators" or whathaveyou.
According to the ontological argument, God is unique in that once a person knows the definition, he must know that God exists.
But, as I said, that's false. Simply defining something doesn't bring it into being. Just because you've communicated to me a definition doesn't bring anything into being; otherwise you must conclude the existence of the "perfect island" just as soon as I speak those words to you.
But there's no such island, regardless. The ontological proof is false by inspection, which is why it's universally rejected except by the ignorant.
Except we have a thing called the Bible, which is the best thing we have to understanding the will of God.
The Bible is of no use in understanding the will of God, because the Bible has nothing to do with the will of God. Anybody can write a Bible; indeed, it's trivially easy to write a better bible than the Bible. Many have done so.
On the contrary, the overwhelming consensus is that he did live.
The consensus of Christians, yes. Nonetheless that consensus is potentially incorrect. While I do believe that a man called "Jesus" might have existed at that time, and perhaps was even a religious leader at the time, there's certainly no reason to believe that any of the life of Jesus as described in the Bible actually happened. None of the Bible is contemporary with Jesus. There's no written record of his statements - only make-believe not first written until seven decades later - or as many as twelve.
Jesus may have existed, though there's no proof. The Christ as described in the Bible is absolutely mythological, and that is the scholarly consensus.
Now suppose a large number of people had observed the teapot before it burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere of Alpha Centauri, like a Chai Skylab.
But nobody has, just as nobody observed Christ or God.
There's a historical record, eyewitness accounts, and personal experiences for one, but not the other.
There's none of that for either. Or rather, there's just as much for both - I can find personal testimony of the Flying Spaghetti Monster just as easily as you can find testimony for God. Now, your rebuttal would be that my testifiers are kidding, but yours are delusional, which leaves us with no testimony at all.
You didn't even make a good crack at even one of them
I've destroyed every one, as any reasonable person would conclude. The fact that I'm talking with an ideologue, here, is not lost on me. I hold no hope of convincing you, the delusion is too great. But any reasonable spectator must see that each of your so-called "proofs" is bereft. They're fallacious in every case, I've proven it.
It's fairly true -- if you haven't even taken the minimal amount of self-examination needed to determine what principles you are living by, then you're closer to the animals than humanity, reacting only to your own desires and external stimuli.
True, but what does any of that have to do with philosophy?
Oh, wait - I think I get it. You think that stuff actually is philosophy. Hilarious!
Everything in science has a cause.
Firstly, argument from false premises. Much in science is understood to be uncaused; for instance, atomic decay. Secondly, argument by special pleading - if everything must have a cause, and God is the ultimate cause of the universe, then God too must have a cause - a meta-god to cause God, and a meta-meta-god to cause the meta-god, and so on. Aquinas' argument was dismissed almost immediately for being an infinite regression.
Unlike with unicorns and fairies, we know that God has to exist simply from the definition of him as the most perfect being, as existence is one of the required attributes for perfection.
Anselm's ontological "proof" was dismissed almost immediately for being fallacious; simply defining things does not bring them into being. Otherwise I could bring into being the "perfect island" simply by uttering the word.
All humans have a yearning for God, hence atheists' greater belief in the supernatural than theists, as they attempt to fill their need another way.
Argument from false premises; atheists do not have a yearning for God, if they did, they'd believe in God instead of being atheists. And no, atheists don't have a greater belief in the supernatural than theists. Even if 99% of atheists held some kind of supernatural belief, which surely isn't true, that would still be less than the 100% of theists with supernatural belief - specifically, a supernatural God.
However, we *do* know what the consequences of belief and nonbelief are.
No, of course we don't. For all you know God wants people to use their brains, and be atheists. Perhaps it's all a test to separate rational people from people who will swallow anything; perhaps God wishes to populate Heaven with skeptics. Thus the terms of the wager can be reversed; belief in God leads to damnation and atheism leads to salvation. You have no basis on which to contradict me.
Lewis eliminates the first three possibilities due to various things like his disciples almost universally dying for him
Argument from, I don't know, things that didn't actually happen. There's no historical evidence for Jesus, and certainly none for the martyrdom of his disciples; there's absolutely nothing recorded about Jesus that is known to have existed before seven decades after his supposed birth.
And the idea of disciples dying for a crazy man hardly seems unreasonable given the 20th century. Lewis hadn't lived to see the Jonestown cult, for instance. Every religion has martyrs, scores of them; if Lewis is to be believed then every religion is thus confirmed, and they can't all be right.
As long as the option is a live option (in other words, it's an option a specific person could actually believe in, as opposed to "the world was created by My Little Ponies") which is rational and not self-contradictory, then let him believe it without shame.
But belief in God is irrational and self-contradictory; that's been proven for as long as there's been atheists. It was proven instantaneously every time Aquinas and the rest came up with fallacious arguments for God. It's proven every time Dawkins and Hitchens write books.
And simply because one is presented with a question does not make both alternatives equally satisfactory. If I put a gun to your head and ask you to decide whether or not a teapot is currently in orbit around Alpha Centauri, the fact that there's no evidence either way does not make both alternatives equally reasonable. To believe that the teapot is there
There's no good reason to accept the non-existence of the supernatural either.
Sure there is - the supernatural's complete failure to be substantiated by any evidence in every single test. That's a great reason. The lack of evidence for milk in your fridge is more than enough to send you to the store for some; it's hardly unreasonable to conclude from the same lack of evidence - the universal failure of the supernatural to ever hold up to scrutiny - that the supernatural entities being proposed are, in all likelyhood, make-believe.
If someone claims that they're Napoleon, do you immediately expect them not to realize the sky is blue?
Sure. All bets are off. They might just as easily claim it to be pink as blue. They've demonstrated an inability to discern truth from fiction in one area; I wouldn't count on their ability to do so in any other. It would be foolish to do so.
How do you know that they adequately proved it?
Open and auditable methods. They're right there in the papers, you know - "Materials and methods." You can look and see exactly what they did.
And, at the last straw, if I don't believe them I can do the same experiment myself. If I spend the time I can become as much an expert as they are, and do the exact same experiment.
There's no such replicability in religion. If I have doubts about the revelations that John received, there's no way I can replicate the experience. You can't study to be a prophet. You can't get a degree in divine revelation. That's faith-based thinking.
Well then, bring on the cold fusion and the antigrav, 'cause there was never a need for anyone else to test and confirm it.
What are you even talking about? Those were tested, and disconfirmed. There was a need, and scientific fraud was revealed. The process worked.
There's nothing comparable in religion. Not even close.
Show me a line where I said or directly implied that one must accept as inerrant scripture when faced with physical evidence to the contrary.
Er, wait. Now you're asking me to prove something I never said. You denied that anybody does this at all, that to assert that people do was "divorced from reality." Your words. I know what they mean. You don't seem to.
The stereotype that all people of faith are dogmatic is false -- thus divorced from reality.
All people? You asserted that the assertion that even some were dogmatic was "divorced from reality." At the same time that you were being dogmatic, of course, which is what makes the whole thing so hilarious.
There's really no such thing as a "religious moderate". Certainly you're not one. Whenever belief comes under attack, religious moderates reach for every tool that the fundamentalists first picked up. If you're so moderate, so non-dogmatic, why are you making every single argument the fundamentalists make?
A person who has read the Bible for years probably knows more about it than someone who has never read it and is only familiar with a few verses hear and there quoted by others.
Sure. The fallacious part of your argument is assuming that the first is the Christian and the second is the atheist, when it's the reverse that's more usually true.
Second, there's your assertion that if two people read the Bible and come to different conclusions, then one (or both) of them are obviously not cleaving to what it says.
It's not my assumption, buddy. It's what religion's defenders are saying. Upthread there's a defender upbraiding a guy for asserting that Christians follow the Bible - that is, are fundamentalists. And now here's you saying that we should automatically assume that a Christian follows the Bible so closely as to be an expert on the subject.
Well, which is it? Are Christians to be assumed to be fundamentalist Bible experts, or not? Are they to be assumed to be adherents of their Bible, or not? You can't have it both ways. Maybe you religionists could get together and agree on the arguments you're going to make? Just a thought.
That is a sad truth, one of the many ways in which common, modern American Protestant beliefs don't really follow the Bible.
So maybe it's not a good idea to assert that all Christians are to be assumed to be experts in their own Bible, and when an atheist questions the material in front of a believer, we should not automatically adopt the believer's position on the assumption that they're the expert.
Just a thought.
An odd argument -- that atheists are produced primarily as matter of rebellion against Christianity.
Not Christianity specifically, but in America, yes, atheists predominantly are from a religious background. Why wouldn't they be?
Does that mean that you believe that faith is the natural state of man before being exposed to Christianity?
Sure. Bad thinking is easier to do than good thinking. It's easier to accept the dictates of an authority than to think for yourself. It's easier to anthropomorphize natural phenomena than to accept the reality of an impersonal universe. There's even good evolutionary reasons for these things being easier to do - skepticism can get you killed.
Children believe in Santa Claus. They're practically born believing in Santa. That's an interesting fact about human mental processes; it doesn't have anything to do with the actual existence of Santa Claus, of course.
A logical conclusion drawn from starting premises must be true whenever the premises are true.
And axioms are true only because they're assumed to be true. There's no available proof of Euclid's Fifth postulate, for example; it's only true when you assume it to be true to do Euclidian geometry, and it's only false when you assume it to be false to result in non-Euclidian geometry. There's not even any logical sense in asking the question "is the Fifth postulate true or false"? Because it's both, or neither - it's whichever you'd like to to be, for purposes of doing certain kinds of geometry.
That's where logic gets you. That's why logic isn't especially useful for finding things out about the world we live in. The conclusions of logic are true only for purposes of argument.
It's the foundation for a person's life.
Nonsense. I know philosophers like to take credit for other people's work - like they way they take credit for science - but here you are trying to take credit for my whole life when you've done none of the work of actually living it.
Truly, the arrogance of the philosopher is astounding.
They haven't done so convincingly, and have actually done so in exception to the historical record.
They haven't convinced you, you mean, but it's not at all clear that you're a person capable of being convinced by reason. Certainly your ridiculous ideas about logic and philosophy indicate you're not especially reasonable.
No -- all claims should be inspected for logical weaknesses, or tested if possible.
Except for your own, apparently.
There are rational arguments for and against God
But there aren't. There are no rational arguments for God. There are only dishonest ones, like the argument you've been presenting here. There are only arguments based on falsehood for the existence of God.
But, hey, prove me wrong. Show me the compelling rational argument for God that isn't based on false premises. I'm certain that I can explode your false assumptions in the space of five minutes, but I could be wrong. (I haven't been so far.) If you had a rational argument for God you'd be the first.
I'm more horrified by atheistic morality when it gets in charge, like, you know, in the USSR, Cambodia in the 70s, or China under Mao.
A government that says "God is the state; the state is God" by definition cannot be atheistic. None of those governments promoted good reasoning based on good evidence - which is the atheism we're talking about here - they simply replaced one kind of faith with another. One kind of religion with another.
The horrors of the USSR or Cambodia were not the result of their populations acting too rationally, or refusing to accept things on the basis of bad evidence. Your own examples prove the horrors of religious thinking.
And my point is that rejecting the existence of the supernatural does not inherently lead to rational behavior.
Gosh, I never said that it did. Someone who's an atheist because talking rabbits told them there was no such thing as God earns as much derision in my book as a religious believer. After all, some religions are nominally atheist. They don't get a pass because it's the same kind of fallacious, faith-based thinking. Belief in things for no good reason. That's the problem at the root.
Nor does accepting the existence of the supernatural inherently lead to irrational behavior (especially in the domain of the observable).
But that's where it fails. There's no good reason to accept the existence of the supernatural. None. The only way to do it is with faith-based thinking, which is by definition irrational; thus, someone who accepts the supernatural is already behaving irrationally, in at least one instance.
Now, you're trying to tell me that someone who embraces irrationality in one area can't be expected to be irrational in any other; I don't see why that would be true. Someone crazy enough to assert, in all seriousness, that they are 18th-century general Napoleon Bonaparte can reliably be expected to be crazy about other things, too.
You haven't proven the vast majority of what you believe in -- you've just accepted it from others you trust.
Nonsense. The strictures of the scientific method allow me to accept as proven information that others have done the work to prove. That's how it works - it doesn't matter who does the proving. There's nothing at all similar in religion.
Directly quote me saying something to that effect, and link it.
I did, already. You're either forgetful or a liar. Probably both depending on what's convenient. There's certainly no honest defense of religion.
If you think you have proof of the absence of a soul, I'd love to see it.
Proof of the absence of what?
Do you see your error yet?
Do you see yours? "Divorced from reality." I know what that phrase means. You don't seem to. You're either ignorant or a liar.
So, when debating Nietzsche, you should always trust the opinion of the person who's never read his books over the scholar of Nietzsche, because the latter is going to be a dogmatic fanboy of it?
Well, wait. Which is it going to be? Are we going to assume that every adherent of a religion cleaves so closely to their holy book in word and deed that they're a qualified expert on it simply from studying it so much, or that religions are social practices in a context well beyond, for most people, the strictures of their bibles?
Religion's defenders want to have it both ways, it seems. When we're talking about what's in the book, an adherent of a religion is assumed to be such a devotee of their bible that their opinion can't be questioned. But, paradoxically, we can't be allowed to assume that these individuals actually cleave all that closely to what is written there, so what's actually written there is irrelevant to the religious experience.
It's nonsense. You can't have it both ways. The simple fact is that if Islam is anything like Christianity, it's the atheists who are more likely to be familiar with the Bible. We live in a nation where the vast majority of Christians think the Bible says "God helps those who help themselves". The truth is that if most Christians and Muslims actually knew what their book said there'd be a whole lot less Christians and Muslims, and a lot more atheists. Forget Dawkins and Hitchens. The Bible is the book that's produced the most atheists.
Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything.
I think maybe you haven't studied much of either. The conclusions of logic are axiomatic conclusions, which means you have to assume the axioms for the conclusions to be true.
It's a word-game. That's what philosophy is, a word-game. The conclusions of philosophy are true only by assumption, they generally bear no relationship to reality. There's no rigor at all in the field of philosophy.
Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case.
Except that it is the case, I can construct examples that prove that it's the case, and both Hitches and Dawkins have done so. Atheism doesn't "get" people to believe anything except in the power of reason and scrutiny to get at probable truths about the universe.
Which certainly makes a lot more sense than what religion offers - make-believe. In a world where religion has the power to take 19 educated architects, engineers, and teachers and compel them to kill themselves and 3000 other innocent people - not because a gun was put to their heads, but because words were said to them - that's a power that we have to inspect and investigate. When you say that Dawkins claims religion doesn't "change how people act", I know I'm talking to someone who hasn't really investigated his argument. It's religion's power to make people act worse than they normally would - say, when a Chinese man murders two women to sell them as "ghost brides" instead of as living slaves - that leads to the conclusion that it's a net negative, especially when the statistics prove that religion doesn't have the reciprocal power to make people act better than they would. (If you believe otherwise then you have a lot of explaining to do, like the fact that high divorce rates are associated with high religiosity. Or the fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison.)
There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.
There is a contradiction, or at least a looming caveat, when someone says "I've pledged my life to putting claims about the universe and reality to intense scrutiny - except for these specific claims, which I set beyond all inspection for no good reason at all."
Are we going to inspect claims, or accept them without testing? I don't understand someone who refuses to decide, and seemingly lives two lives - a professional life where they search for rigorous knowledge, and a personal life where they simply believe whatever they'd like to believe.
It doesn't make sense to me. It should be one or the other. Somebody who tries to have it both ways is living a lie - one of those two lives is a lie.
This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.
I'm horrified at the idea that you've swallowed the advertising that says morality and ethics are the sole province of religion. I don't see why it's necessary to believe claims about reality on the basis of no good evidence in order to be a good person. That's nonsense. I'm all in favor of ethics and morality informing scientific progress and the use of scientific advancements. The problem is that religion doesn't actually have anything to do with ethics. It's more often the case that religion is an "out" for people to ignore morality and ethics, and that's why it's a net force for bad in human societies, and has always been.
And reason, unlike religion, starts with what is right in front of us. We start with observation.
Secularist movements have had their warts too -- eugenics, Stalin's gulags, the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Oh, that's nonsense. I'm not talking about secularism, I'm talking about not believing in things on the basis of no good evidence. Whatever Stalin's Russia was - and it's hard to argue that a belief system that says "God is the state; the state is God" is atheist in any way - they certainly weren't a rationalist culture that rejected faith-based thinking. The Lysenko episodes prove this.
The idea, however, that religions cannot fulfill any useful purpose in society is wrong.
I love this attitude of yours - fundamentalist religion is just fine for the rubes, for the common person, but you're too smart to fall for it. If it's not good for you, why should we believe it's any good for anybody else? What possible use can come from wrong ideas, when the right ones are right here in front of us?
I've never said that when science and religion disagree that you should discard physical evidence for words in a book.
But that's the attitude you're defending and promoting.
All I'm saying is that there's no reason to discard what religion has to say about the things that science can't explain or help much with: how should I live my life, what is the meaning of all of this, what becomes of us after death, etc.
But science can and does help with those things, and has answers for those questions. What the defenders of religion seem to believe is that if we don't personally like those answers, we can simply discard them and believe whatever we'd like to believe.
Science shows us that, after death, our bodies are consumed by other organisms and the material of our bodies becomes part of other living things, as the bodies of other living things became part of us during our lives. Religion simply discards that truth and substitutes a fictional narrative of "eternal souls" and "life in heaven" and "meeting our deceased loved ones in the afterlife" because it feels better to believe those things, and organizations that can provide a space for that belief secure temporal power and influence over adherents.
And that's what you're defending. Abandoning knowledge to embrace comforting falsehoods.
but not everyone who has a belief in a higher power is 100% faithful to the words in a book.
Sure. Some people are creative enough to make up their own falsehoods to substitute for knowledge. I literally don't understand that perspective. You know it's all made up, because you're the one making it up, and yet you believe it anyway. The power of human imagination to generate ideas that bear no relationship to reality doesn't seem to faze you at all. Truly astounding arrogance.
Is there no value in the teaching to "love your neighbor as yourself?" Is there no value in the teaching to "turn the other cheek?" Is the idea that one should "judge not lest you be judged yourself?"
If those ideas do have value, and I'm not saying they don't, they have value not because they appear in an ancient book of myths, but because they lead to positive consequences when a society decides to implement them.
And in that case, we can come up with them by ourselves. We need not tie them to ridiculous religious mythology.
I assert that not all people of faith are like them
Read your own post. You asserted that they didn't even exist. Remember? I quoted you.
Because it's a lot easier for you to defend religion if you pretend like fundamentalists aren't real, and that fundamentalist religious belief doesn't constitute a far greater portion of religionists than your own goofy moderatism.
A good argument, but one that postulates that reality itself is real -- which can't be proven or disproven.
But that's not what his argument postulates at all. Did you read? The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
The problem with all faiths is dogma -- the willing blindness to the possibility that you can be wrong and that the world has not revealed all or enough of its truths to you.
But that's nonsense. The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence. Faith-based thinking is the pernicious enemy of being right about things.
The simple truth is that the universe, or providence, or whatever, isn't going to take care of us. Survival - of individuals, of societies - demands that we have accurate information about how things in the world work. The power that comes from that knowledge simply can't be denied, and has absolutely no peer in any religion, which is why conflicts of religion vs. science invariably - universally - are resolved in science's favor. Eventually even the religious adherents cannot deny the power of accurate knowledge about the real world.
But they try. Oh, they try. And they're aided by hordes of religious moderates like yourself who stand up by the score to run interference for them.
You, personally, seem to have in your blanket assertion that accepting a belief in something beyond what the senses can prove requires schizophrenia and irrationality.
No, he's objectively correct. It takes a weird kind of double-think to assert "separate magesteria" between science and religion and then accept without question religious claims that are clearly scientific in nature. There's something wrong with your mind if you can spend all day hunting for real-world claims to put to rigorous scrutiny - which is the work of scientists - and then, when 5:00 rolls around, simply turn that off and go back to accepting dubious claims with no scrutiny whatsoever. We should be very wary when we discover individuals who can exhibit that kind of duplicity.
The world isn't divided into "questions we can answer with science" and "questions we can answer with religion", at least if by "answer" you mean anything besides simply making things up and jumping to conclusions. The divisions are "questions we can answer with science" and "questions we can't answer at all." That's it. Faith has no power except to lead us to delude ourselves.
Not everybody who follows the teachings of the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, the Sutras, etc. feels that everything in it must be 100% literally true or that values must never change over time.
Which is a pretty good indication that those books have little that is useful to a rational society.
You wish paint all people of faith as dogmatic fundamentalists who look only to their holy books for the truth and willfully ignore all other sights around them, but that ignorant stereotype of yours is divorced from reality, and is highly offensive when thrown in the faces of people that it simply doesn't apply to.
But you're the exact example of what he's talking about. There you are, quoting from the Bible and the Quran and asserting that the idea of a "dogmatic fundamentalist" is "divorced from reality" - but a second ago you gave the example of Fred Phelps' churchgoers, who I assure you are very real and very adamant that anything they see with their own eyes, even, that contradicts the Bible must be an illusion.
Not only are the Plainsburo Baptist Church members living proof of what he's talking about, you are, too.
Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".
When he starts posting pics from the lumber yard near your house, I don't think you'll be thinking that it's "just the internet" anymore. That was the level these threats rose to - actual stalking of the individuals targeted.
A SETI researcher gets the signal, it's poured over, it's unlike anything they have come across before. They get excited. They call NASA. One excitable scientist calls a newspaper reporter he knows. Then the NSA shows up. They put the clamp down.
So why didn't they do it with the first signal potentially from extra-terrestrial life?
I think you're overlooking the incredible human capacity to simply disregard information that contradicts cherished belief. Hence, creationism. The truth of the matter is that people believe that to believe in "little green men" makes you crazy, and to suppose that they're actually trying to talk to us makes you a crazy drunk, or worse. In the same way that most people seem to believe that only the criminally insane would believe that human beings are the descendants of apes, despite the fact that that's the inescapable conclusion from the scientific data.
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I don't know, man. I remember all the sharpest super-twinks I know declaring that in 3.0 druid was either the flat-out toughest or in the running for toughest class (depending on who you asked), and 3.5 made them tougher.
Maybe I've played them wrong, or something, but I've never gotten that sense. For starters the druid is almost always the party healer, so you're using all your actions to heal the fighter instead of anything else. Wild shape is almost always useless, because the animals you can take the shape of invariably have lower AC and less-damaging attacks than just you in regular form. And it takes a feat slot to be able to cast spells in wild shape. Other than that it's just another kind of sneaking, like taking the form of a hawk to spy on bad guys or whatever.
By the time you can cast Bull's Strength it won't make up for not having a fighter's BAB progression, nor does Bear's Endurance make up for having to allocate points into Wisdom and Charisma instead of dumping everything into Strength and Constitution like the fighter can do. (And you should be casting those spells on him instead, anyway.)
Add to that the severe armor and weapon restrictions - the spear is the most damaging weapon you can wield - and the bookkeeping issues involved in animal companions and summoned monsters that make them such a hassle to use effectively you don't generally even bother and it's hard for me to see druids as especially twink-worthy. I mean compared to the fighter/rogue spiked-chain tripmaster, druids don't even bear mentioning.
But, I'm not a very experienced twink. Maybe somebody can explain how it's done with druids.
Some of it for me is certainly in resource management, which from the rest of your post is something I can tell you don't particularly enjoy.
I like it just fine right up to the point where it ends the adventure for everybody else at the table. They're certainly not getting rid of resources, by any means; if you haven't already you should play with the Book of the Nine Swords material to get a sense of what it's going to be like. That sense of managing resources and preparing abilities is still there, but my swordsage doesn't have to guess what he's going to need for a whole day's worth of adventuring - and he's not in desperate need of 8 hours of rest after only four battles - but he still has resources he needs to manage, and the choice to prepare one maneuver means that another can't be used when it really would have mattered.
I really like the variety of having some characters in a group that are on a fairly even keel of power where others have only a few moments of greatness throughout a day (often, many fights) that they have to carefully hoard and marshal at appropriate times.
If you're the second guy, though, you may not understand how the first guy feels. Maybe he's not as excited by the idea of doing nothing more than hitting with his 1d12 greataxe every round while everybody at the table cheers when the wizard picks up ten d6's for fireball damage. Sure, monopolizing the show-off power is good if you're the guy who gets to have it, but there's 2-4 other people at the table, and they'd like a chance to show off once in a while, too. "Ol' reliable greataxe damage" isn't much fun when the wizard is bending reality to his very whim, as much fun as that is for you.
Nonetheless, if you want to play a character with reliable, constant power, I don't think that's going anywhere.
I like that there are a ton of feats and spells and things in the game that are combat-important but don't deal damage, such as sleep or entangle.
Not going anywhere, and they're adding mechanisms for non-combat encounters, like social encounters. So I don't think you have anything to fear, there.
I like that you can play a wide variety of characters that all feel/play really different.
I can't imagine that's going anywhere, either. Book of the Nine Swords gets maligned sometimes as "spells for fighters" but that's really not at all what it's about; ultimately, there's not much difference from the martial maneuvers in B9S and using a feat like Whirlwind Strike.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, but everything I know so far about 4E suggests that some of these things are going outright and others are being diminished in importance severely, and that we're moving more to a game where everyone's got a bunch of 'once per encounter' abilities, and every fight of their career involves every character firing off their toughest ones in succession.
I just don't get that sense. It certainly isn't that way in 3e now, wizards don't blow their toughest spells one after another in the same order for the day's encounters, and it certainly doesn't work that way in B9S, where you really have to set yourself or the situation up to get the best use out of your per-encounter power or you've wasted it. And there's still a daily-use power system, too; it's just not that every power is per-day. In 3e running out of per-day powers, like spells, is the end of the delve. Period. In 4e it sounds like running out of per-day powers doesn't leave you so powerless.
Things like: pushing more to an 'everyone does damage' model vs. non-damaging malediction/battlefield control, or designing classes more along the MMORPG 'holy trinity' of tank/healing/DPS.
The healing/tank/DPS was already in Dungeons and Dragons, though; that's why it's in so many fantasy video games. And honestly, tanking and DPS'ing are fun, and they should be in the game just like they've always been. Healing isn't much fun at the table-top, and the
Since based on what I've heard so far, not one of these is actually happening
You must not be listening, then, since they're actually doing every single thing you mentioned in your list.
1) Grapple and other complicated rules are being totally revamped, though they haven't said how.
2) Static bonuses to stats are pretty much out - not from spells, not from magic items. That leads to...
3) Since magic items no longer provide static benefits to stats, you no longer have to have stat-improving magic items just to keep up with the "standard" power curve. No more Amulets of Natural Armor +2 or whatever. Gone. Good riddance. Characters should be heroes because they're heroic, not because they're weighed down with stat-improving gear. (On the other hand, some characters are heroes because of magic swords, or what have you, but the Weapon of Legacy mechanic is, in my games, how I plan to deal with that in 4th edition. Somehow.)
4) Every level, some choice to make - some feat or power or spell to choose, instead of 2 levels out of three simply recording a new BAB, saves, and HP.
5) I don't know the playtesters, but it's hard to imagine anybody but twinks wanting to work at WoTC in the first place, so I think they have that one covered.
So, have a little optimism. They're covering this stuff. Listen to their podcast or something.
... who feels like they may have simplified the most interesting parts clear out of the game, filled the gaps liberally with WoW, and ended up with a game that, admittedly, has a much lower barrier to entry but is also not particularly interesting?
Neither of us know what the mechanics are going to be like, but from my perspective you couldn't be more wrong. I don't know specifically what you're talking about when you say "the most interesting parts", but the parts that they've confirmed aren't there anymore are the parts that always bothered me the most - like the way any dungeon adventure longer than four encounters stops being "let's go have adventures" and becomes "we need to find a way to sleep."
I mean, my idea of heroic fantasy doesn't include a desperate search for a Motel 6 (or, God forbid, a magic spell that simply creates one.) So the new spellcasting mechanic of "at-will" powers sounds pitch-perfect to me. But, at the same time, a few of the powers are attrition-based, too, so having to decide whether or not to blow your big spells now or save them for something even more tough is still there.
The more I hear about 4th Edition the more I wish it was the D&D I was running right now. As it is, every single one of my players now has at least one maneuver , if not their class or PrC, from Book of the Nine Swords - which is sort of prototype 4th Edition in some ways - and I think that speaks volumes. My players don't even want to sleep in dungeons, that's how stupid it feels to play that way, and they've all, independently, gravitated to ways to keep the power level up without using attrition powers.
I don't know what it means to "fill the gaps liberally with WoW", except as far as WoW simply game-ified what players and DM's were already doing. Maybe you could elaborate on that.
I can't choose how the government uses the chunk of my income that it takes.
Yeah, you're right. If only there was some month, say November, when we could actually choose the people who would make up the government and therefore influence the process by which our taxes were spent.
Oh, wait.
Remember "no taxation without representation"? The problem for you is that the converse is also true.
Why the hell would a rational person give more money to an organization known for being bloated and inefficient?
Compared to what, exactly? People who complain about the ineffectiveness of government always seem to forget the Post Office. I can mail a letter for about 30 cents, and sending the same letter with either UPS or FedEx costs at least 3 dollars. Plus the Post Office picks it up at my home without me even telling them to come around. There's a hell of a lot less waste in the government than there is in corporate America.
Which is a different argument entirely. I was saying that it is rational to believe in God, and that a rational, scientifically-minded person cannot be faulted for believing in God, since the two are quite compatible.
But it's not at all a different argument. There's only one reason for a rational person to believe in something - it's truth. It's rational to believe in that which one has concluded is true. It's irrational, by definition, to believe in that which one knows to be false.
The argument about whether or not God actually exists and whether or not it's rational to believe in God is the exact same argument. They're the same thing, because to believe in something for any other reason than its veracity is irrational, by definition.
You're missing the point in that it that the truth value of the proposition "God exists" is not known, though there are reasonable arguments both for and against it.
You're missing the point, though, that you're wrong. The truth value of that proposition can be decided, and has been, because there are no reasonable arguments for it, only against it. The only arguments put forth in support of that proposition have all turned out to be wrong.
Hence, atheism.
Certainly if it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt to all people that God exists, then only fools would not believe in God, and vice versa.
You keep missing the fact that that vice versa is the situation we're in; and no, you don't have to be a fool to believe in God, even intelligent people fall for delusions.
Because if one side of the debate had 100% proof, it wouldn't be much of an argument.
And yet we see thousands of arguments in the public discourse where one side has 100% proof and yet, there's another side. Abstinence-based education in schools. Supply-side economics. People who deny the Holocaust. People who think the moon landing was a hoax. Creationism.
You seem to ignore the capacity of human beings to ignore evidence and proof, yet that's the characteristic most associated with religion. With faith. The simple fact is that having 100% proof is hardly sufficient to end most arguments because you can always find irrational people who want to argue with you.
With the caveat that at least that happiness and internal peace is one of the things promised by Christianity, and which it does seem to deliver.
Hardly, hence atheists. And of course every religion has the power to deliver relative happiness and "internal peace", usually by making nonbelievers as unhappy as possible. That's hardly a reason for a reasonable person to make a decision about what is true. That's how unreasonable people make decision, by definition.
The evidence is unclear.
No, it's not. The evidence is actually very clear that it does nothing at all for colds, and therefore the decision to spend $10 on echinacea is inherently unreasonable, because it's known to be a waste of money. And even if there was no evidence whatsoever, the idea that both alternatives are equally rational is nonsense, as the example of the Alpha Cenauri teapot proves.
God forbid that profits might for once be kept by the people who created it
God forbid that the people and entities that benefit from public works be expected to contribute some portion to their upkeep.
I suppose you think that it's just fine to skip out on the check, too - if the restaurant wants to get paid for their meal they shouldn't have windows in the men's room, right?
Your milk example shows that you believe in the logical fallacy that absence of evidence is that same as evidence of absence.
It's a fallacy in the same way that science is circular reasoning, and it says a lot more about the impotence of logic to fail to apprehend obvious truths than anything else.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That's how absence is detected. That's how you know how to go out for more milk. You've internalized the lie that that's bad reasoning, but clearly you still go out and buy milk when you're out, so you understand that regardless of logic's mistaken identification, you know it's good reasoning.
One statement by a person that you think it logically flawed is an inherent sign that all other statements must be considered suspect to the point of expecting the absurd response of claiming that something before their eyes is not as they see it.
Yes, exactly. After all it's right in front of their eyes that they're not Napoleon, too, but they don't seem to see it. They're not just wrong; they're crazy wrong. "Deluded" is the word we use for those people.
Not all wrong ideas rise to the level of delusion, but when someone clings to a position in spite of all the evidence of their senses, at some point you have to suspect their sanity. When someone is wrong there's only three possibilities - they're ignorant of something, they're lying, or they're insane. The Napoleon guy has been informed that he's wrong, so he's not ignorant. And the prsopect of being committed is scary enough for most people that we can assume he's not lying. Thus, he's insane.
That's why belief that one is Napoleon when one is not is a delusion, a recognized mental illness. And soon, the delusional belief in God will be recognized the same way. After all psychologists immediately recognized it as delusion when a group of anorexic girls created Ana, the Goddess of Anorexia; soon they'll recognize the delusion of the God of the Bible. And then you people can get the help you need.
You can't do it with everything.
I can do it with anything I want, in science. Surely you're familiar with the idea of a random representative sample?
You believe that everyone who thinks differently than you on matters of religion is a fundamentalist, a crazy, and incapable of moderation.
I don't believe it; I've observed it. Your own conduct here has been proof of it. Religion itself doesn't allow for moderation. How can a claim of absolute eternal truth be "moderated"? That's why it's so easy for fundamentalists to mock religious multiculturalism - it's risible. Religions make mutually contradictory claims of truth. They can't all be right. How can that be moderated?
Religious moderation is impossible, a priori. And as if that weren't enough, there's all the evidence of so-called "moderates" like you who are precisely every bit as dogmatic and inflexible as the "fundamentalists." There's really no difference between the two of you.
Why would all (but a select few) atheists spend every week reading something they consider an offensive fantasy?
Several reasons. One is to argue about it with believers. Another is that they became atheists as a result of reading the Bible, and finding its deep internal contradictions and sadistic portrayal of God to be so troubling that they reject the faith in toto. The truth is that the Bible is the cause of far more atheism than any other book, at least in America.
Two people can be very familiar with the text, to the point of being experts, and follow it very differently.
Words mean things. If the Bible can simply be interpreted to justify whatever conduct one wishes to, then you're not making a very good case for the particular veracity of the text.
If everyone was capable of interpreting the Bible the *exact* same way and applying it to situations in life that it never talked about in the *exact* same way, we wouldn't have hundreds of Christian denominations and off-shoots.
That's assuming they're reading it at all. As I've argued, that's generally not the case. A majority of Americans, predominatly Christians, for instance, think that the Bible says things like "God helps those who help themselves" and "cleanliness is next to godliness."
Your idea that Christians, in general, are familiar with the Bible simply doesn't hold water. And there's not any reason to believe that it's different for any other religion. People, like the internet, route around damage; that is, they "interpret" - read: ignore - inconvenient strictures when they're an obstacle to the life they want to live.
Read up on how many pro-life women have abortions - have regular abortions.
The believer is likely to be *more* familiar with the material. *More* is a RELATIVE TERM! Is this so freaking impossible to understand?
I understand it just fine. It's just not true. Why don't you get that yet?
This is the kind of stuff they cover in Sunday school, after all. What do you think people do at church in the mornings before the main worship service?
You're talking about a religion, friend, where it was more than 13 centuries before most churches had a Bible in a language the laity could even speak. Bible familiarity is not a characteristic of Christian belief, except for a few small sects that stress it. It's still the case that most members of mainstream churches hardly ever read it at all.
Children are born believing in Santa.
Practically, I said. And it's true. Who was the last child you had to tell about Santa Claus? Not the truth that he doesn't really exist, but the myth itself, to a child who had never even heard the name? Has that ever even happened to you? Sure, there's children who don't believe in him any more, but there certainly aren't any, at any age, in our society who've never even heard of him.
It is the concept of God, and only the concept of God only, the most perfect possible entity, whereby the definition alone lets us know it exists.
Nonsense. The way I've defined it, the perfect island is the most perfect entity that is also an island, and because "existence" is a property (or so its being defined) that you can't be perfect without, the definition alone by this reasoning means that the perfect island must exist. A putative island that exists is more perfect than one that does not, thus, the perfect island must exist, by definition.
But it doesn't. The reasoning doesn't work. You can't define things into existence. They exist, or they do not, regardless of humans defining things. It doesn't matter how much you define things as existing, or even as having to exist - nobody cares what you think has to exist.
As I said, there's arguments against it, but this isn't one of them.
The ontological overload is one of them. It emerged almost immediately because people saw how immediately ridiculous the ontological argument is. The ontological overload proves it, in a very intuitive fashion. That's why the ontological proof was so immediately dismissed by thinkers like Aquinas. You have to be some kind of idiot to think defining things makes them true in any way except for purposes of argument - like the axioms of logic.
And yet you are there in your body, and I am here in my body.
Right. Hardly noteworthy, just as its hardly any surprise that my eyes supply vision to my brain and your eyes supply vision from yours. It's hardly a surprise that my hand is attached to my arm and yours hands are at the ends of yours.
So to, it's equally unsurprising, to any but the most egotistical or dogmatic, that my brain does my consciousness, and your brain does yours. Whose else would it do?
No memory of course of your previous self, since you don't have the neurons for that, but even if you deny the reality of the consciousness, you must recognize the illusion of consciousness.
Then it can't be me, either, you've just proved it - it won't have the neurons for that, either. It'll be someone else - someone it does have the neurons for.
Do you exist?
Does my vision exist? If I go blind would it make sense to suggest that my vision could somehow be reborn in someone else's body?
No, of course not. Nobody can have my sense of humor if I lose it, either. It's gone, it doesn't go anywhere, it's simply obliterated.
As I will be. As you will be. I know it's scary but adults have to deal with it. Maybe it's time you did, instead of spinning comforting fables? Aren't we a little too old for security blankets?
I'm arguing that Christianity is a rationally coherent position, that there are good reasons to believe in God, and that it has pragmatic reasons as well.
But you don't seem to be arguing it's truth. At least, not here. I think that's noteworthy. You offer a great deal of criteria for belief but none of them are especially relevant - there's one reasonable criteria for taking a position or not, and that criteria is whether or not it's true.
Whether or not it makes you feel good is a rationale for children, for the immature, not for adults. Not for rational people. If you want to be a Christian because it makes you happy, regardless of its truth, you've given the game away. Comforting fictions are not rational. They're understandable, it's a common human weakness, but they're not rational.
Proposition / Counter-proposition, attacking premises, etc., is what argument is all about.
...none of which you specify. Convincing, certainly.
So I'm still waiting for the counter-propositions. You've simply dismissed legitimate rebuttals, which is what leads to my conclusion that you don't have any defense for your arguments.
So the point stands. There's no reasonable defense of belief in God; the only defenses are inherently dishonest or nonsensical, like the idea that uttering a definition brings something into being.
Your statement about Hawking is a good crack at it, but one can logically show the world had to have a beginning, which there's not really a good answer for.
But Hawkings answers it, which you'd know if you'd read his work. The problem has been addressed by science. Maybe you don't understand it yet, but that's hardly an objection.
It's not necessarily God, but the result of the logical argument rather resembles God in certain ways.
The God of the Bible? Hardly. Look, I guess you can append the word "God" on top of whatever you want - your sock drawer could be God if you felt the need to have a god to explain your socks - but that's hardly reasonable, either. Words mean things. To say "God" is to refer to a specific series of mythological ideas. Gods by definition are mythological, which puts a fairly substantial burden on those trying to promote their actual existence.
A burden not met by dictionary games like the ontological argument - which again has no support except among the dogmatic, who have no need for it anyway.
The concept of God is precisely unique in that the concept of God, and only of God, can one know is true simply because you understand the definition.
But you're wrong. The perfect island is defined precisely the same way. It has to be - it's perfect! Nonetheless, simply because I've defined it that way and told you the definition - and you've understood it, I hope - doesn't bring it into being. Understanding is not a process of creation; the universe doesn't care what you do or don't understand. Thus, the ontological "proof" is no proof at all. It's just a word-game.
Around 30 years, but who's counting?
Sourceless assertions.
Furthermore, the Christianity as Myth hypothesis fails for a variety of reasons.
"I believe Christianity is a myth, therefore Christianity is a myth."
But that's not how it is at all. I was a Christian when I came to know these things. "I believe Christianity is true, but the evidence convinces me that it's a myth." That's what it looks like when a reasonable person is convinced by evidence. Clearly you need an example.
Bad reasoning, on the other hand, never fails to raise my ire.
What, like this reasoning?
All of the atheists I know believe in something really bizarre, from ESP to aliens to being able to empathically talk to plants.
If you're going to unwittingly commit a fallacy of overgeneralization, color me not impressed by your vaunted reasoning skills. The simple fact is that you're prejudiced against atheists as a function of your religious delusions.
And I literally mean all of them.
Now you know one who doesn't. At best for you that's 99.9999% of atheists to 100% of theists. At worst for you, of course, you're completely wrong about the incidence of supernaturalism among skeptics and atheists.
Based on the only evidence we have, in fact, it seems more plausible than not that it might do so.
To the contrary; it seems highly improbable. We know that consciousness is what brains do, in the same way that vision is what eyes do. When a man goes blind we would find it highly risible to suggest that his vision had gone on to some afterlife, or had been "reborn" as the eyes of some infant. And despite the fact that we could construe it as "blindness - vision - bl
If you don't think you have one, then you're just a tool.
/= God.
I have a hard time taking seriously the argument that I'm a tool when you're quoting CS Lewis.
Secondly, the answer, which you missed, was that something timeless had to be the answer.
Timeless
The universe cannot be infinitely old; it must have had a beginning.
You need to acquaint yourself with the work of Stephen Hawking on this subject. Closed timelike curves essentially obviate the need for the "universe's beginning" or any "timeless creators" or whathaveyou.
According to the ontological argument, God is unique in that once a person knows the definition, he must know that God exists.
But, as I said, that's false. Simply defining something doesn't bring it into being. Just because you've communicated to me a definition doesn't bring anything into being; otherwise you must conclude the existence of the "perfect island" just as soon as I speak those words to you.
But there's no such island, regardless. The ontological proof is false by inspection, which is why it's universally rejected except by the ignorant.
Except we have a thing called the Bible, which is the best thing we have to understanding the will of God.
The Bible is of no use in understanding the will of God, because the Bible has nothing to do with the will of God. Anybody can write a Bible; indeed, it's trivially easy to write a better bible than the Bible. Many have done so.
On the contrary, the overwhelming consensus is that he did live.
The consensus of Christians, yes. Nonetheless that consensus is potentially incorrect. While I do believe that a man called "Jesus" might have existed at that time, and perhaps was even a religious leader at the time, there's certainly no reason to believe that any of the life of Jesus as described in the Bible actually happened. None of the Bible is contemporary with Jesus. There's no written record of his statements - only make-believe not first written until seven decades later - or as many as twelve.
Jesus may have existed, though there's no proof. The Christ as described in the Bible is absolutely mythological, and that is the scholarly consensus.
Now suppose a large number of people had observed the teapot before it burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere of Alpha Centauri, like a Chai Skylab.
But nobody has, just as nobody observed Christ or God.
There's a historical record, eyewitness accounts, and personal experiences for one, but not the other.
There's none of that for either. Or rather, there's just as much for both - I can find personal testimony of the Flying Spaghetti Monster just as easily as you can find testimony for God. Now, your rebuttal would be that my testifiers are kidding, but yours are delusional, which leaves us with no testimony at all.
You didn't even make a good crack at even one of them
I've destroyed every one, as any reasonable person would conclude. The fact that I'm talking with an ideologue, here, is not lost on me. I hold no hope of convincing you, the delusion is too great. But any reasonable spectator must see that each of your so-called "proofs" is bereft. They're fallacious in every case, I've proven it.
It's fairly true -- if you haven't even taken the minimal amount of self-examination needed to determine what principles you are living by, then you're closer to the animals than humanity, reacting only to your own desires and external stimuli.
True, but what does any of that have to do with philosophy?
Oh, wait - I think I get it. You think that stuff actually is philosophy. Hilarious!
Everything in science has a cause.
Firstly, argument from false premises. Much in science is understood to be uncaused; for instance, atomic decay. Secondly, argument by special pleading - if everything must have a cause, and God is the ultimate cause of the universe, then God too must have a cause - a meta-god to cause God, and a meta-meta-god to cause the meta-god, and so on. Aquinas' argument was dismissed almost immediately for being an infinite regression.
Unlike with unicorns and fairies, we know that God has to exist simply from the definition of him as the most perfect being, as existence is one of the required attributes for perfection.
Anselm's ontological "proof" was dismissed almost immediately for being fallacious; simply defining things does not bring them into being. Otherwise I could bring into being the "perfect island" simply by uttering the word.
All humans have a yearning for God, hence atheists' greater belief in the supernatural than theists, as they attempt to fill their need another way.
Argument from false premises; atheists do not have a yearning for God, if they did, they'd believe in God instead of being atheists. And no, atheists don't have a greater belief in the supernatural than theists. Even if 99% of atheists held some kind of supernatural belief, which surely isn't true, that would still be less than the 100% of theists with supernatural belief - specifically, a supernatural God.
However, we *do* know what the consequences of belief and nonbelief are.
No, of course we don't. For all you know God wants people to use their brains, and be atheists. Perhaps it's all a test to separate rational people from people who will swallow anything; perhaps God wishes to populate Heaven with skeptics. Thus the terms of the wager can be reversed; belief in God leads to damnation and atheism leads to salvation. You have no basis on which to contradict me.
Lewis eliminates the first three possibilities due to various things like his disciples almost universally dying for him
Argument from, I don't know, things that didn't actually happen. There's no historical evidence for Jesus, and certainly none for the martyrdom of his disciples; there's absolutely nothing recorded about Jesus that is known to have existed before seven decades after his supposed birth.
And the idea of disciples dying for a crazy man hardly seems unreasonable given the 20th century. Lewis hadn't lived to see the Jonestown cult, for instance. Every religion has martyrs, scores of them; if Lewis is to be believed then every religion is thus confirmed, and they can't all be right.
As long as the option is a live option (in other words, it's an option a specific person could actually believe in, as opposed to "the world was created by My Little Ponies") which is rational and not self-contradictory, then let him believe it without shame.
But belief in God is irrational and self-contradictory; that's been proven for as long as there's been atheists. It was proven instantaneously every time Aquinas and the rest came up with fallacious arguments for God. It's proven every time Dawkins and Hitchens write books.
And simply because one is presented with a question does not make both alternatives equally satisfactory. If I put a gun to your head and ask you to decide whether or not a teapot is currently in orbit around Alpha Centauri, the fact that there's no evidence either way does not make both alternatives equally reasonable. To believe that the teapot is there
There's no good reason to accept the non-existence of the supernatural either.
Sure there is - the supernatural's complete failure to be substantiated by any evidence in every single test. That's a great reason. The lack of evidence for milk in your fridge is more than enough to send you to the store for some; it's hardly unreasonable to conclude from the same lack of evidence - the universal failure of the supernatural to ever hold up to scrutiny - that the supernatural entities being proposed are, in all likelyhood, make-believe.
If someone claims that they're Napoleon, do you immediately expect them not to realize the sky is blue?
Sure. All bets are off. They might just as easily claim it to be pink as blue. They've demonstrated an inability to discern truth from fiction in one area; I wouldn't count on their ability to do so in any other. It would be foolish to do so.
How do you know that they adequately proved it?
Open and auditable methods. They're right there in the papers, you know - "Materials and methods." You can look and see exactly what they did.
And, at the last straw, if I don't believe them I can do the same experiment myself. If I spend the time I can become as much an expert as they are, and do the exact same experiment.
There's no such replicability in religion. If I have doubts about the revelations that John received, there's no way I can replicate the experience. You can't study to be a prophet. You can't get a degree in divine revelation. That's faith-based thinking.
Well then, bring on the cold fusion and the antigrav, 'cause there was never a need for anyone else to test and confirm it.
What are you even talking about? Those were tested, and disconfirmed. There was a need, and scientific fraud was revealed. The process worked.
There's nothing comparable in religion. Not even close.
Show me a line where I said or directly implied that one must accept as inerrant scripture when faced with physical evidence to the contrary.
Er, wait. Now you're asking me to prove something I never said. You denied that anybody does this at all, that to assert that people do was "divorced from reality." Your words. I know what they mean. You don't seem to.
The stereotype that all people of faith are dogmatic is false -- thus divorced from reality.
All people? You asserted that the assertion that even some were dogmatic was "divorced from reality." At the same time that you were being dogmatic, of course, which is what makes the whole thing so hilarious.
There's really no such thing as a "religious moderate". Certainly you're not one. Whenever belief comes under attack, religious moderates reach for every tool that the fundamentalists first picked up. If you're so moderate, so non-dogmatic, why are you making every single argument the fundamentalists make?
A person who has read the Bible for years probably knows more about it than someone who has never read it and is only familiar with a few verses hear and there quoted by others.
Sure. The fallacious part of your argument is assuming that the first is the Christian and the second is the atheist, when it's the reverse that's more usually true.
Second, there's your assertion that if two people read the Bible and come to different conclusions, then one (or both) of them are obviously not cleaving to what it says.
It's not my assumption, buddy. It's what religion's defenders are saying. Upthread there's a defender upbraiding a guy for asserting that Christians follow the Bible - that is, are fundamentalists. And now here's you saying that we should automatically assume that a Christian follows the Bible so closely as to be an expert on the subject.
Well, which is it? Are Christians to be assumed to be fundamentalist Bible experts, or not? Are they to be assumed to be adherents of their Bible, or not? You can't have it both ways. Maybe you religionists could get together and agree on the arguments you're going to make? Just a thought.
That is a sad truth, one of the many ways in which common, modern American Protestant beliefs don't really follow the Bible.
So maybe it's not a good idea to assert that all Christians are to be assumed to be experts in their own Bible, and when an atheist questions the material in front of a believer, we should not automatically adopt the believer's position on the assumption that they're the expert.
Just a thought.
An odd argument -- that atheists are produced primarily as matter of rebellion against Christianity.
Not Christianity specifically, but in America, yes, atheists predominantly are from a religious background. Why wouldn't they be?
Does that mean that you believe that faith is the natural state of man before being exposed to Christianity?
Sure. Bad thinking is easier to do than good thinking. It's easier to accept the dictates of an authority than to think for yourself. It's easier to anthropomorphize natural phenomena than to accept the reality of an impersonal universe. There's even good evolutionary reasons for these things being easier to do - skepticism can get you killed.
Children believe in Santa Claus. They're practically born believing in Santa. That's an interesting fact about human mental processes; it doesn't have anything to do with the actual existence of Santa Claus, of course.
A logical conclusion drawn from starting premises must be true whenever the premises are true.
And axioms are true only because they're assumed to be true. There's no available proof of Euclid's Fifth postulate, for example; it's only true when you assume it to be true to do Euclidian geometry, and it's only false when you assume it to be false to result in non-Euclidian geometry. There's not even any logical sense in asking the question "is the Fifth postulate true or false"? Because it's both, or neither - it's whichever you'd like to to be, for purposes of doing certain kinds of geometry.
That's where logic gets you. That's why logic isn't especially useful for finding things out about the world we live in. The conclusions of logic are true only for purposes of argument.
It's the foundation for a person's life.
Nonsense. I know philosophers like to take credit for other people's work - like they way they take credit for science - but here you are trying to take credit for my whole life when you've done none of the work of actually living it.
Truly, the arrogance of the philosopher is astounding.
They haven't done so convincingly, and have actually done so in exception to the historical record.
They haven't convinced you, you mean, but it's not at all clear that you're a person capable of being convinced by reason. Certainly your ridiculous ideas about logic and philosophy indicate you're not especially reasonable.
No -- all claims should be inspected for logical weaknesses, or tested if possible.
Except for your own, apparently.
There are rational arguments for and against God
But there aren't. There are no rational arguments for God. There are only dishonest ones, like the argument you've been presenting here. There are only arguments based on falsehood for the existence of God.
But, hey, prove me wrong. Show me the compelling rational argument for God that isn't based on false premises. I'm certain that I can explode your false assumptions in the space of five minutes, but I could be wrong. (I haven't been so far.) If you had a rational argument for God you'd be the first.
I'm more horrified by atheistic morality when it gets in charge, like, you know, in the USSR, Cambodia in the 70s, or China under Mao.
A government that says "God is the state; the state is God" by definition cannot be atheistic. None of those governments promoted good reasoning based on good evidence - which is the atheism we're talking about here - they simply replaced one kind of faith with another. One kind of religion with another.
The horrors of the USSR or Cambodia were not the result of their populations acting too rationally, or refusing to accept things on the basis of bad evidence. Your own examples prove the horrors of religious thinking.
And my point is that rejecting the existence of the supernatural does not inherently lead to rational behavior.
Gosh, I never said that it did. Someone who's an atheist because talking rabbits told them there was no such thing as God earns as much derision in my book as a religious believer. After all, some religions are nominally atheist. They don't get a pass because it's the same kind of fallacious, faith-based thinking. Belief in things for no good reason. That's the problem at the root.
Nor does accepting the existence of the supernatural inherently lead to irrational behavior (especially in the domain of the observable).
But that's where it fails. There's no good reason to accept the existence of the supernatural. None. The only way to do it is with faith-based thinking, which is by definition irrational; thus, someone who accepts the supernatural is already behaving irrationally, in at least one instance.
Now, you're trying to tell me that someone who embraces irrationality in one area can't be expected to be irrational in any other; I don't see why that would be true. Someone crazy enough to assert, in all seriousness, that they are 18th-century general Napoleon Bonaparte can reliably be expected to be crazy about other things, too.
You haven't proven the vast majority of what you believe in -- you've just accepted it from others you trust.
Nonsense. The strictures of the scientific method allow me to accept as proven information that others have done the work to prove. That's how it works - it doesn't matter who does the proving. There's nothing at all similar in religion.
Directly quote me saying something to that effect, and link it.
I did, already. You're either forgetful or a liar. Probably both depending on what's convenient. There's certainly no honest defense of religion.
If you think you have proof of the absence of a soul, I'd love to see it.
Proof of the absence of what?
Do you see your error yet?
Do you see yours? "Divorced from reality." I know what that phrase means. You don't seem to. You're either ignorant or a liar.
So, when debating Nietzsche, you should always trust the opinion of the person who's never read his books over the scholar of Nietzsche, because the latter is going to be a dogmatic fanboy of it?
Well, wait. Which is it going to be? Are we going to assume that every adherent of a religion cleaves so closely to their holy book in word and deed that they're a qualified expert on it simply from studying it so much, or that religions are social practices in a context well beyond, for most people, the strictures of their bibles?
Religion's defenders want to have it both ways, it seems. When we're talking about what's in the book, an adherent of a religion is assumed to be such a devotee of their bible that their opinion can't be questioned. But, paradoxically, we can't be allowed to assume that these individuals actually cleave all that closely to what is written there, so what's actually written there is irrelevant to the religious experience.
It's nonsense. You can't have it both ways. The simple fact is that if Islam is anything like Christianity, it's the atheists who are more likely to be familiar with the Bible. We live in a nation where the vast majority of Christians think the Bible says "God helps those who help themselves". The truth is that if most Christians and Muslims actually knew what their book said there'd be a whole lot less Christians and Muslims, and a lot more atheists. Forget Dawkins and Hitchens. The Bible is the book that's produced the most atheists.
Philosophy and logic are interesting in that you can study what *must* be true, regardless of, well, anything.
I think maybe you haven't studied much of either. The conclusions of logic are axiomatic conclusions, which means you have to assume the axioms for the conclusions to be true.
It's a word-game. That's what philosophy is, a word-game. The conclusions of philosophy are true only by assumption, they generally bear no relationship to reality. There's no rigor at all in the field of philosophy.
Atheism gets people to believe things that are patently false, like Hutchens saying that religion is irrational and bad (for some definition of bad in a world that doesn't involve a moral law, naturally), or Dawkins claiming that religion doesn't change how people act, or, hey, your statements implying that religious people must be blind to the real world in order to believe in God. Which is not at all the case.
Except that it is the case, I can construct examples that prove that it's the case, and both Hitches and Dawkins have done so. Atheism doesn't "get" people to believe anything except in the power of reason and scrutiny to get at probable truths about the universe.
Which certainly makes a lot more sense than what religion offers - make-believe. In a world where religion has the power to take 19 educated architects, engineers, and teachers and compel them to kill themselves and 3000 other innocent people - not because a gun was put to their heads, but because words were said to them - that's a power that we have to inspect and investigate. When you say that Dawkins claims religion doesn't "change how people act", I know I'm talking to someone who hasn't really investigated his argument. It's religion's power to make people act worse than they normally would - say, when a Chinese man murders two women to sell them as "ghost brides" instead of as living slaves - that leads to the conclusion that it's a net negative, especially when the statistics prove that religion doesn't have the reciprocal power to make people act better than they would. (If you believe otherwise then you have a lot of explaining to do, like the fact that high divorce rates are associated with high religiosity. Or the fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison.)
There is no contradiction between saying, I am a Scientist and a Man of God.
There is a contradiction, or at least a looming caveat, when someone says "I've pledged my life to putting claims about the universe and reality to intense scrutiny - except for these specific claims, which I set beyond all inspection for no good reason at all."
Are we going to inspect claims, or accept them without testing? I don't understand someone who refuses to decide, and seemingly lives two lives - a professional life where they search for rigorous knowledge, and a personal life where they simply believe whatever they'd like to believe.
It doesn't make sense to me. It should be one or the other. Somebody who tries to have it both ways is living a lie - one of those two lives is a lie.
This probably horrifies you to no end, but science in the absence of all morality and ethics leads to much worse tragedies and horrors than religion ever created.
I'm horrified at the idea that you've swallowed the advertising that says morality and ethics are the sole province of religion. I don't see why it's necessary to believe claims about reality on the basis of no good evidence in order to be a good person. That's nonsense. I'm all in favor of ethics and morality informing scientific progress and the use of scientific advancements. The problem is that religion doesn't actually have anything to do with ethics. It's more often the case that religion is an "out" for people to ignore morality and ethics, and that's why it's a net force for bad in human societies, and has always been.
Where is the Mother Theresa of the atheists?
You idiot. Mother Theresa was an atheist.
You have to start somewhere.
And reason, unlike religion, starts with what is right in front of us. We start with observation.
Secularist movements have had their warts too -- eugenics, Stalin's gulags, the Cultural Revolution, etc.
Oh, that's nonsense. I'm not talking about secularism, I'm talking about not believing in things on the basis of no good evidence. Whatever Stalin's Russia was - and it's hard to argue that a belief system that says "God is the state; the state is God" is atheist in any way - they certainly weren't a rationalist culture that rejected faith-based thinking. The Lysenko episodes prove this.
The idea, however, that religions cannot fulfill any useful purpose in society is wrong.
I love this attitude of yours - fundamentalist religion is just fine for the rubes, for the common person, but you're too smart to fall for it. If it's not good for you, why should we believe it's any good for anybody else? What possible use can come from wrong ideas, when the right ones are right here in front of us?
I've never said that when science and religion disagree that you should discard physical evidence for words in a book.
But that's the attitude you're defending and promoting.
All I'm saying is that there's no reason to discard what religion has to say about the things that science can't explain or help much with: how should I live my life, what is the meaning of all of this, what becomes of us after death, etc.
But science can and does help with those things, and has answers for those questions. What the defenders of religion seem to believe is that if we don't personally like those answers, we can simply discard them and believe whatever we'd like to believe.
Science shows us that, after death, our bodies are consumed by other organisms and the material of our bodies becomes part of other living things, as the bodies of other living things became part of us during our lives. Religion simply discards that truth and substitutes a fictional narrative of "eternal souls" and "life in heaven" and "meeting our deceased loved ones in the afterlife" because it feels better to believe those things, and organizations that can provide a space for that belief secure temporal power and influence over adherents.
And that's what you're defending. Abandoning knowledge to embrace comforting falsehoods.
but not everyone who has a belief in a higher power is 100% faithful to the words in a book.
Sure. Some people are creative enough to make up their own falsehoods to substitute for knowledge. I literally don't understand that perspective. You know it's all made up, because you're the one making it up, and yet you believe it anyway. The power of human imagination to generate ideas that bear no relationship to reality doesn't seem to faze you at all. Truly astounding arrogance.
Is there no value in the teaching to "love your neighbor as yourself?" Is there no value in the teaching to "turn the other cheek?" Is the idea that one should "judge not lest you be judged yourself?"
If those ideas do have value, and I'm not saying they don't, they have value not because they appear in an ancient book of myths, but because they lead to positive consequences when a society decides to implement them.
And in that case, we can come up with them by ourselves. We need not tie them to ridiculous religious mythology.
I assert that not all people of faith are like them
Read your own post. You asserted that they didn't even exist. Remember? I quoted you.
Because it's a lot easier for you to defend religion if you pretend like fundamentalists aren't real, and that fundamentalist religious belief doesn't constitute a far greater portion of religionists than your own goofy moderatism.
A good argument, but one that postulates that reality itself is real -- which can't be proven or disproven.
But that's not what his argument postulates at all. Did you read? The "realness" of reality is irrelevant; regardless of the reality of Reality, the Reality that we perceive is the "only context in which anything is meaningful."
God, I hate philosophy. The problem with so many of you people is that you talk yourself out of knowledge, and into ignorance.
The problem with all faiths is dogma -- the willing blindness to the possibility that you can be wrong and that the world has not revealed all or enough of its truths to you.
But that's nonsense. The problem with religion is that it gets people to believe things that are demonstratively false - "abstinence-only education prevents pregnancy and STD's" - on the basis of no good evidence. Faith-based thinking is the pernicious enemy of being right about things.
The simple truth is that the universe, or providence, or whatever, isn't going to take care of us. Survival - of individuals, of societies - demands that we have accurate information about how things in the world work. The power that comes from that knowledge simply can't be denied, and has absolutely no peer in any religion, which is why conflicts of religion vs. science invariably - universally - are resolved in science's favor. Eventually even the religious adherents cannot deny the power of accurate knowledge about the real world.
But they try. Oh, they try. And they're aided by hordes of religious moderates like yourself who stand up by the score to run interference for them.
You, personally, seem to have in your blanket assertion that accepting a belief in something beyond what the senses can prove requires schizophrenia and irrationality.
No, he's objectively correct. It takes a weird kind of double-think to assert "separate magesteria" between science and religion and then accept without question religious claims that are clearly scientific in nature. There's something wrong with your mind if you can spend all day hunting for real-world claims to put to rigorous scrutiny - which is the work of scientists - and then, when 5:00 rolls around, simply turn that off and go back to accepting dubious claims with no scrutiny whatsoever. We should be very wary when we discover individuals who can exhibit that kind of duplicity.
The world isn't divided into "questions we can answer with science" and "questions we can answer with religion", at least if by "answer" you mean anything besides simply making things up and jumping to conclusions. The divisions are "questions we can answer with science" and "questions we can't answer at all." That's it. Faith has no power except to lead us to delude ourselves.
Not everybody who follows the teachings of the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Torah, the Sutras, etc. feels that everything in it must be 100% literally true or that values must never change over time.
Which is a pretty good indication that those books have little that is useful to a rational society.
You wish paint all people of faith as dogmatic fundamentalists who look only to their holy books for the truth and willfully ignore all other sights around them, but that ignorant stereotype of yours is divorced from reality, and is highly offensive when thrown in the faces of people that it simply doesn't apply to.
But you're the exact example of what he's talking about. There you are, quoting from the Bible and the Quran and asserting that the idea of a "dogmatic fundamentalist" is "divorced from reality" - but a second ago you gave the example of Fred Phelps' churchgoers, who I assure you are very real and very adamant that anything they see with their own eyes, even, that contradicts the Bible must be an illusion.
Not only are the Plainsburo Baptist Church members living proof of what he's talking about, you are, too.
Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".
When he starts posting pics from the lumber yard near your house, I don't think you'll be thinking that it's "just the internet" anymore. That was the level these threats rose to - actual stalking of the individuals targeted.
A SETI researcher gets the signal, it's poured over, it's unlike anything they have come across before. They get excited. They call NASA. One excitable scientist calls a newspaper reporter he knows. Then the NSA shows up. They put the clamp down.
So why didn't they do it with the first signal potentially from extra-terrestrial life?
I think you're overlooking the incredible human capacity to simply disregard information that contradicts cherished belief. Hence, creationism. The truth of the matter is that people believe that to believe in "little green men" makes you crazy, and to suppose that they're actually trying to talk to us makes you a crazy drunk, or worse. In the same way that most people seem to believe that only the criminally insane would believe that human beings are the descendants of apes, despite the fact that that's the inescapable conclusion from the scientific data.
excuse my ignorance (too lazy to google) but if CO2 is heavier than air how does it facilitate all the global warming stuff?
Gases are miscible.
Forget Google. You were too lazy to think, even?
Oh, I gotcha. I guess I didn't follow the context shift.