The ability of humans to make decisions that are not solely a result of deterministic (physical -> chemical -> physiological) or irresistible outside processes.
Pretty much got evolution and natural selection down, thanks. I have a degree and everything, so I must have satisfied the experts.
Problem is, extant humans have largely left the main stream of natural selection, and haven't been evolving physically for most of the time we've been writing things down. Now, people talk about us evolving in other ways than anatomy and physiology, that's another thread.
Bottom line: human behavior does not appear to follow strict deterministic paths the way amoeba or worm or fish does. We believe we can make decisions counter to the run of entropy and natural selection. Free will generally means that humans can make decisions that are not simply results of a deterministic physical / chemical / physiological process.
We have concepts like kindness, good and evil, altruism, we seem to share - across cultures - a sense of metaphysical things. Not all of it even requires a particular church and dogmatic tradition. But it persists. Humans are the only species that demonstrates a search for meaning, and an overriding motivation to change their own world - and others. There is of course a possibility that each human is subject to their own private delusion.
Well, you repeatedly (here and other threads) establish that is something is not rational, then it is irrational, and that logical arguments are necessary.
I listed other things that have no rational, logically necessary basis, wondering if you object to them as well. Guess not.
I'm trying to see why your reaction to irrational religion / spirituality is so visceral while you seem to have no parallel reaction to other things that meet your criteria.
"Modern humans? Humans as a whole were always stupid, irrational, and uninformed."
I think you may find a lot of people are able to draw a gradation of the sophistication of human thought, and that we seem to be betting on that gradation increasing.
So to recap:
- "evil" is what you say it is;
- but you have no idea what's driving you to think that, since free will is off the table;
- you have no idea (nor the inclination to find out) why things give you joy;
- but somehow under the drumbeat of rationalism you can't imagine what a jaded reductionist is?
Oh, the most spiritually uplifting service I've been to in years was a bar mitvah. I don't consider Catholicism to be the exclusive truth about things meta.
I can pray, attend services, build an understanding of "good" and be a communicant without doing everything / excluding everything that you've heard about Catholics. There is a healthy debate among the members of the church about the practice of their faith, and their increasing ability to hold the curia's feet to the fire.
So far Catholicism has been the best fit to my sensibilities, and that may be due to 16 years of Catholic education (8 of them in the sciences with never a punch pulled on the science part, four of those with Benedictines and no whitewashing of science). Every religion has some bizarre thing that makes you take a step back, mostly couched in literalism - which most people don't really take absolutely.
In a past life, I was probably an old Jew, though I was most comfortable traveling in Muslim countries seeing spirituality woven into daily life. Haven't been to a far-eastern setting but I bet I'd make a pretty good Buddhist.
like "infallibility". That word does not mean what you think it means. There are several meanings to the concept of "infallibility" as regards the pope, the most commonly used one wasn't cemented until 1870. It's not as simple as "the pope is infallible" and generally refers to specific matters. It's not like being bitten by a radioactive spider.
There is a long tradition of dissent on the matter from members of the church. As for catechesis, with Vatican II, there is much more official use and direction within the catechism on interpretation of the scriptures - including literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic understandings. Far more latitude than a passing consideration could claim.
In short, it's not the strict take-it-or-leave-it situation that many conclude it to be.
would concede there's a tad more possible value to the major religions than the FSM or what was likely started in a bet by a third-rate SciFi author.
So what is it you truly believe? Beyond the stuff that can be derived by F=ma, PV=nRT, A-T / C-G... why do you do what you do? You've already eliminated free will. What's left to work for? What can be considered "evil" (you refer to it pretty regularly) and why work against it?
psychology / psychiatry as not-really-science. Your comment would seem a great leap of progress to some.
So a lot of people claim that Shakespeare's work informs a lot about human behavior and provides object lessons in a creative way. Do you see value in that?
BTW I'm down with Randi. Had him on our TV show. Twice. He eloquently describes a system of dealing with the fascination and inspiring parts of our world without using religion. It's brilliant. I use it a lot. Also I have personal beliefs that he does not hold. We did not need to cross swords.
Exactly. Except for the part about dismissing all of human literature. You were taught a lot of what you know through analogy, allegory, examples, unless of course you simply cracked open the CRC as a toddler and it's been reductionism ever since. But I doubt it.
As stated originally, yes, science is that rigorous thing you use to understand the physical world. Millenia of humans have understood there are things that transcend the physical world. Apples. And also, there are some pretty powerful writings that seem to help people understand how people behave and interact, a good deal of which cannot be explained by physics, chemistry and physiology. Certain scripture seems to be in that vein. Oranges.
As long as I recognize the limitations of each, where is the harm if I choose to use principles from the New Testament to be a decent person, or gain understanding by reading Hamlet, or Huck Finn, or Letters From The Earth (which BTW should come free with every bible) , or anything else?
The laws of physics are subject to revision and further data, following rigorous testing. Newton's laws are "certainties" under a certain set of conditions. Yes, they work very well to hold up bridges and move things and repair broken stuff. But if we were still laboring under them alone, the world would be a very different place.
Yes, you can have those things without a church. And also churches do those things.
Community does not need religion. But for some stubborn reason people tend to be spiritual, often expressing that through organized religion. How do you explain an enduring need for this? Are modern humans just stupid / irrational / uninformed?
By your claims, things that have no rational basis are irrational. So art, music, humor, fiction... buh bye.
They have been figurative for some time now. Every system of thought deals in abstraction and concrete work. There is a (significant, depending on the particular faith) subset that is literalist, but they're not necessarily the main line of thought.
the difference between a church and it's leadership. I already know about all of the things you mentioned. And they range from miserable to horrible. Your assumptions about what I know and what I support is your issue, not mine. The Catholic hierarchy is all wrong about a number of current things - their war on women religious (nuns to you), their insistence on single priests and their exclusion of women from ordination are long-time ones, and their new-found nonsense about health insurance payment is a huge black eye.
If we're going to start divesting ourselves of affiliations based on atrocities committed by this or that group, then you'll likely need to spend the rest of your life as a self-proclaimed box turtle, because "humanity" is on that list.
saw a value in churches and what they could provide to a person's emotional wellbeing, specifically those in need.
Is it rational to demean Sperbels for his comment?
Or maybe your response is not demeaning - provided you can provide a clinical, rational definition of "well and truly f'd up"?
Do you make personal judgements that transcend rationality? How do you reconcile those?
You can answer those or not, point is there is more to human understanding than the dimension of rational / irrational.
Humor is irrational. Music. Art - whew - Jesus Waterskiing Christ is art ever irrational - don't know about you, but it'd be a sad world without a whole lot of things that are not necessarily rational.
that Hume blew a great big hole in empiricism. Being a scientist is irrational on that level.
Fact is, every system of thought falls apart if you pick at it long enough.
You use what works, and there are a lot of variations of that.
It's part of what makes it cool to be a human.
Personally, I take my reductionism by the bagful rather than wholesale - there are reasons Vulcans are a fiction and computers don't run the world.
on a fool's errand, but he did get the ball rolling with regard to reconciling dogma with reality. It's overblown solution to a (now known to be) inflated problem, but imagine where things would be without him. A modern parallel would be only Nixon could go to China.
Guess how I know I'm not? Because it's nowhere in my post. The ten commandments (that tiny part of the OT that you're referring to) were written for a bunch of people allegedly wandering in the desert for a long time. To paraphrase Lewis Black, you see how we behave now with police and cameras - can you imagine how depraved a few thousand people in the desert could get? Those people probably needed a rule book.
The stuff in the bible is more than the commandments - just like the stuff in Greek mythology is more than the script of one story. But we still see underlying truths in many forms of stories - from the Bible to Steinbeck to White to Salinger to Homer etc.
I don't know if David and Bathsheba existed. I do know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn didn't, but the stories about them are still valuable even though they're made-up tales of nonexistent humans.
Much of human literature is fiction, and it still has value - if for no other reason than "lessons will be repeated until learned". East of Eden is hardly considered scripture, but it still illustrates basic truths about human behavior, and is in no small part a retelling of some of the Bible.
The members of the church are not as monolithic as the curia. At ground level there's a healthy debate about a lot of things. That barely makes the news. I've spent long hours in knock down / drag out discussions with abbots, bishops and other hifalutin clergy about interpretation of church teachings. We always part amicably and live our lives as we see fit. I even teach evolutionary bio, historical geology, genetics and natural selection in Catholic schools and attend mass sometimes even in the same day. And get thanked for each by the same people.
Yeah, I'll double check, but pretty sure I'm not doing those things.
So recounting the past bad things about the people running the church does not make me as a church member - an accomplice.
You might be interested in the delta between what the curia holds and what a diverse cross-section of Catholics actually do in real life.
I'm interested in the parts where - despite clearly being mythology, it frames basic truths about human behavior. Much like we derive from Greek mythology, Hindu mythology, etc.
I'm interested in the parts where it lays out a pretty good model for how to be nice to others, how to think about purpose in life vis a vis others and that people can change and don't have to be perpetual doofuses.
Hey - many things humans do are irrational.
That doesn't mean they're irresponsible.
I have no proof that any god exists. But if prayer as meditation helps focus the mind and understand things more, where's the harm?
I realize that it's fashionable, almost required in some circles to assert that human understanding is endlessly reducible, and that empiricism is the only way to understand things, but at some point you have to recognize the extent of human interaction is more than mechanical / chemical / physical.
Belief in free will is irrational if you hold that cognition is driven by biology which is driven by chemistry which is driven by physics which is just a giant game of billiards.
Yet there you and I go believing we make responsible decisions all day long.
Responding to my post is irrational. It serves no direct function as the odds are that you will not stop me from my way of using what's at hand, nor will I convince you to behave otherwise.
"Rational" still has to have some sort of values judgement driving it, as do your and my views of "good" and "evil".
You buy your views one place, I buy mine another.
If you think you have a lock on rationality, you're going to have to take that up with the myriad other views of what's rational.
You could sell tickets to that bracket, and most of the players will be surprised at their seeding.
Of course humans those matches have been going on for millennia.
That's what's so cool about being human.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could try and be clearer.
The ability of humans to make decisions that are not solely a result of deterministic (physical -> chemical -> physiological) or irresistible outside processes.
Pretty much got evolution and natural selection down, thanks. I have a degree and everything, so I must have satisfied the experts. Problem is, extant humans have largely left the main stream of natural selection, and haven't been evolving physically for most of the time we've been writing things down. Now, people talk about us evolving in other ways than anatomy and physiology, that's another thread. Bottom line: human behavior does not appear to follow strict deterministic paths the way amoeba or worm or fish does. We believe we can make decisions counter to the run of entropy and natural selection. Free will generally means that humans can make decisions that are not simply results of a deterministic physical / chemical / physiological process. We have concepts like kindness, good and evil, altruism, we seem to share - across cultures - a sense of metaphysical things. Not all of it even requires a particular church and dogmatic tradition. But it persists. Humans are the only species that demonstrates a search for meaning, and an overriding motivation to change their own world - and others. There is of course a possibility that each human is subject to their own private delusion.
Well, you repeatedly (here and other threads) establish that is something is not rational, then it is irrational, and that logical arguments are necessary. I listed other things that have no rational, logically necessary basis, wondering if you object to them as well. Guess not. I'm trying to see why your reaction to irrational religion / spirituality is so visceral while you seem to have no parallel reaction to other things that meet your criteria. "Modern humans? Humans as a whole were always stupid, irrational, and uninformed." I think you may find a lot of people are able to draw a gradation of the sophistication of human thought, and that we seem to be betting on that gradation increasing.
So to recap: - "evil" is what you say it is; - but you have no idea what's driving you to think that, since free will is off the table; - you have no idea (nor the inclination to find out) why things give you joy; - but somehow under the drumbeat of rationalism you can't imagine what a jaded reductionist is?
Oh, the most spiritually uplifting service I've been to in years was a bar mitvah. I don't consider Catholicism to be the exclusive truth about things meta. I can pray, attend services, build an understanding of "good" and be a communicant without doing everything / excluding everything that you've heard about Catholics. There is a healthy debate among the members of the church about the practice of their faith, and their increasing ability to hold the curia's feet to the fire. So far Catholicism has been the best fit to my sensibilities, and that may be due to 16 years of Catholic education (8 of them in the sciences with never a punch pulled on the science part, four of those with Benedictines and no whitewashing of science). Every religion has some bizarre thing that makes you take a step back, mostly couched in literalism - which most people don't really take absolutely. In a past life, I was probably an old Jew, though I was most comfortable traveling in Muslim countries seeing spirituality woven into daily life. Haven't been to a far-eastern setting but I bet I'd make a pretty good Buddhist.
like "infallibility". That word does not mean what you think it means. There are several meanings to the concept of "infallibility" as regards the pope, the most commonly used one wasn't cemented until 1870. It's not as simple as "the pope is infallible" and generally refers to specific matters. It's not like being bitten by a radioactive spider. There is a long tradition of dissent on the matter from members of the church. As for catechesis, with Vatican II, there is much more official use and direction within the catechism on interpretation of the scriptures - including literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic understandings. Far more latitude than a passing consideration could claim. In short, it's not the strict take-it-or-leave-it situation that many conclude it to be.
would concede there's a tad more possible value to the major religions than the FSM or what was likely started in a bet by a third-rate SciFi author. So what is it you truly believe? Beyond the stuff that can be derived by F=ma, PV=nRT, A-T / C-G... why do you do what you do? You've already eliminated free will. What's left to work for? What can be considered "evil" (you refer to it pretty regularly) and why work against it?
"The Four Witnesses." Prolly at a library. Gives a lot of context about the personalities and agendas for the four traditional books.
it's godless *and* illogical! Win win!
psychology / psychiatry as not-really-science. Your comment would seem a great leap of progress to some. So a lot of people claim that Shakespeare's work informs a lot about human behavior and provides object lessons in a creative way. Do you see value in that? BTW I'm down with Randi. Had him on our TV show. Twice. He eloquently describes a system of dealing with the fascination and inspiring parts of our world without using religion. It's brilliant. I use it a lot. Also I have personal beliefs that he does not hold. We did not need to cross swords.
Exactly. Except for the part about dismissing all of human literature. You were taught a lot of what you know through analogy, allegory, examples, unless of course you simply cracked open the CRC as a toddler and it's been reductionism ever since. But I doubt it. As stated originally, yes, science is that rigorous thing you use to understand the physical world. Millenia of humans have understood there are things that transcend the physical world. Apples. And also, there are some pretty powerful writings that seem to help people understand how people behave and interact, a good deal of which cannot be explained by physics, chemistry and physiology. Certain scripture seems to be in that vein. Oranges. As long as I recognize the limitations of each, where is the harm if I choose to use principles from the New Testament to be a decent person, or gain understanding by reading Hamlet, or Huck Finn, or Letters From The Earth (which BTW should come free with every bible) , or anything else? The laws of physics are subject to revision and further data, following rigorous testing. Newton's laws are "certainties" under a certain set of conditions. Yes, they work very well to hold up bridges and move things and repair broken stuff. But if we were still laboring under them alone, the world would be a very different place.
Yes, you can have those things without a church. And also churches do those things. Community does not need religion. But for some stubborn reason people tend to be spiritual, often expressing that through organized religion. How do you explain an enduring need for this? Are modern humans just stupid / irrational / uninformed? By your claims, things that have no rational basis are irrational. So art, music, humor, fiction... buh bye.
They have been figurative for some time now. Every system of thought deals in abstraction and concrete work. There is a (significant, depending on the particular faith) subset that is literalist, but they're not necessarily the main line of thought.
the difference between a church and it's leadership. I already know about all of the things you mentioned. And they range from miserable to horrible. Your assumptions about what I know and what I support is your issue, not mine. The Catholic hierarchy is all wrong about a number of current things - their war on women religious (nuns to you), their insistence on single priests and their exclusion of women from ordination are long-time ones, and their new-found nonsense about health insurance payment is a huge black eye. If we're going to start divesting ourselves of affiliations based on atrocities committed by this or that group, then you'll likely need to spend the rest of your life as a self-proclaimed box turtle, because "humanity" is on that list.
these days without having to be the yardstick for extremist behavior!
saw a value in churches and what they could provide to a person's emotional wellbeing, specifically those in need. Is it rational to demean Sperbels for his comment? Or maybe your response is not demeaning - provided you can provide a clinical, rational definition of "well and truly f'd up"? Do you make personal judgements that transcend rationality? How do you reconcile those? You can answer those or not, point is there is more to human understanding than the dimension of rational / irrational. Humor is irrational. Music. Art - whew - Jesus Waterskiing Christ is art ever irrational - don't know about you, but it'd be a sad world without a whole lot of things that are not necessarily rational.
that Hume blew a great big hole in empiricism. Being a scientist is irrational on that level. Fact is, every system of thought falls apart if you pick at it long enough. You use what works, and there are a lot of variations of that. It's part of what makes it cool to be a human. Personally, I take my reductionism by the bagful rather than wholesale - there are reasons Vulcans are a fiction and computers don't run the world.
on a fool's errand, but he did get the ball rolling with regard to reconciling dogma with reality. It's overblown solution to a (now known to be) inflated problem, but imagine where things would be without him. A modern parallel would be only Nixon could go to China.
Guess how I know I'm not? Because it's nowhere in my post. The ten commandments (that tiny part of the OT that you're referring to) were written for a bunch of people allegedly wandering in the desert for a long time. To paraphrase Lewis Black, you see how we behave now with police and cameras - can you imagine how depraved a few thousand people in the desert could get? Those people probably needed a rule book. The stuff in the bible is more than the commandments - just like the stuff in Greek mythology is more than the script of one story. But we still see underlying truths in many forms of stories - from the Bible to Steinbeck to White to Salinger to Homer etc. I don't know if David and Bathsheba existed. I do know Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn didn't, but the stories about them are still valuable even though they're made-up tales of nonexistent humans. Much of human literature is fiction, and it still has value - if for no other reason than "lessons will be repeated until learned". East of Eden is hardly considered scripture, but it still illustrates basic truths about human behavior, and is in no small part a retelling of some of the Bible.
The members of the church are not as monolithic as the curia. At ground level there's a healthy debate about a lot of things. That barely makes the news. I've spent long hours in knock down / drag out discussions with abbots, bishops and other hifalutin clergy about interpretation of church teachings. We always part amicably and live our lives as we see fit. I even teach evolutionary bio, historical geology, genetics and natural selection in Catholic schools and attend mass sometimes even in the same day. And get thanked for each by the same people.
Yeah, I'll double check, but pretty sure I'm not doing those things. So recounting the past bad things about the people running the church does not make me as a church member - an accomplice. You might be interested in the delta between what the curia holds and what a diverse cross-section of Catholics actually do in real life. I'm interested in the parts where - despite clearly being mythology, it frames basic truths about human behavior. Much like we derive from Greek mythology, Hindu mythology, etc. I'm interested in the parts where it lays out a pretty good model for how to be nice to others, how to think about purpose in life vis a vis others and that people can change and don't have to be perpetual doofuses.
Hey - many things humans do are irrational. That doesn't mean they're irresponsible. I have no proof that any god exists. But if prayer as meditation helps focus the mind and understand things more, where's the harm? I realize that it's fashionable, almost required in some circles to assert that human understanding is endlessly reducible, and that empiricism is the only way to understand things, but at some point you have to recognize the extent of human interaction is more than mechanical / chemical / physical. Belief in free will is irrational if you hold that cognition is driven by biology which is driven by chemistry which is driven by physics which is just a giant game of billiards. Yet there you and I go believing we make responsible decisions all day long. Responding to my post is irrational. It serves no direct function as the odds are that you will not stop me from my way of using what's at hand, nor will I convince you to behave otherwise. "Rational" still has to have some sort of values judgement driving it, as do your and my views of "good" and "evil". You buy your views one place, I buy mine another. If you think you have a lock on rationality, you're going to have to take that up with the myriad other views of what's rational. You could sell tickets to that bracket, and most of the players will be surprised at their seeding. Of course humans those matches have been going on for millennia. That's what's so cool about being human.
to get a "dead" Kirk past the baddies. Now, if they had them in a Vulcan nerve pinch, I'd worry.
built on the pluses of cold air cures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...