You're right, of course, about how the process really works. But I'm still not completely sold on why national ID is such a terrible idea and why it is such a profound violation of privacy. Is it because it consolidates existing information? If you've done something you don't want the public to know about or you have something, like a diseases, you wish to keep private, well, that information is always out there somewhere, whether at your local county sheriff's department or at your local hostpial.
Now it's fine if you don't want a landlord to see your medical history or political affiliations. I'm not such a big fan of withholding information from (ie lying to) insurance companies about your medical history or doing the same with your criminal record with employers and landlords, etc. But either way, if someone wants to find out about you and your past, the information is out there to be found. I don't see why a national ID would necessarily make this process any easier. Even if the information was all in one database, access to it could be controlled with perms. What's the big deal? Anyone seriously afraid of the Gubmint snooping on their private life is SOL - the Gubmint already has complete information on everyone anyway.
So if there's something major I'm missing, someone please school me on this!
Always look at the bottom line. 9 cents on every tax dollar goes to paying down the debt: 9%. And of course at the end of the day that is the only rate that matters.
The issue I mentioned is only tangentially related with maximizing tax revenue - the Laffer curve is an intuitive and familiar concept thanks to the many parallels that can be found elsewhere in economics, such as maximizing profit through optimal pricing (margin too high, no turnover = no revenue; margin too low = no revenue). It is easier to think of deficit spending as debt-financing versus financing out of revenues. There are some operational advantages to deficit spending, but they are highly debatable and it is terribly, terribly easy for deficit spending to turn into a fiscally irresponsible nightmare, as several recent republican administrations have demonstrated. The place where the Laffer curve becomes relevant is that at some point there must be a source of revenue with which to pay off deficit spending. Perpetual deficit spending is - pardon the pun - a bankrupt policy.
Two other things worth mentioning:
1) Cui bono? Who profits? Corporate lobbyists pushing for deficit spending in the form of massive government contracts, subsidies and tax-credit payouts for their companies whose owners then loan the money the government needs to pay for them is not far from a racket. Here's an analogy: The Mob shows up at your corner store and says you need to buy 'protection'. It costs $100,000. You don't have $100,000. Ah, no problem. The Mob 'loans' you the money - at, say, 9% interest. See what I did there? Out of one pocket and into another, collecting 9 percent along the way. Deficit spending is essentially no different. Fancy theorectical economic crap aside, cui bono from deficit spending? The wealthy.
2) Taxation brackets are upside down anyway. There should be ZERO tax on all who earn under $50,000/year - that's half the adult working population, representing 150 million Americans. Total tax revenue lost? $35 billion - a pittance in scheme of the federal budget. If you want to boost consumer spending, kickstart the economy and rocket into the White House on a landslide victory, that's the beginning and end of your platform right there. The 150 million poorest Americans out there could give a shit about your other policies if it means paying no income tax.
It is important to understand what deficit spending is and the rationale behind it. Deficit spending is borrowing money to pay for government activity instead of paying for that activity with tax revenue. The (highly suspect) rationale is that you don't have to raise taxes to get the same results and can thereby dodge the economic problems associated with higher taxation. By borrowing, the liability is passed on to future tax payers where - according to the theory - the economic growth it has fostered will make the debt easier to pay off. It's like starting a business: borrow money so you can build up a company that will eventually grow enough to pay off the initial debt and then some. The problem is that when you're always borrowing this forms a never-ending cycle that causes inflation and thereby reduces real earnings and purchasing power, so the 'growth' that is fostered shoots itself in the foot. It ends up being a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So why is deficit spending attractive? For several reasons. Politically, it is easy to sell "lower taxes!" For the political Right, it is also a way to shovel money into the pockets of the wealthy: about 1/3 of the debt is loaned to the government by rich people in the form of verystable investments - T-Bills, bonds, etc - at around 9% interest.
I think they often come at the beginning of very hard work too. I've had several Eureka moments in my life, which of course have emerged as products of the sum total of all my life experiences. After the initial epiphany they all required extended periods of intense work in order to be realized.
I have never understood the popularity of Windows with consumers (beyond the obvious monopoly power they wield with personal computer manufacturers), I find their software mostly blech (frankly, anything NOT Word and Excel is just junk)
Now I'm no M$ fanboy, but I think there are some clear and simple explanations for Microsoft's enormous success aside from simply their OS and Office suite market dominance as a near-monopoly. In a nutshell, I think they all boil down to the mass-market effect. I'll invoke the American Beer Analogy here.
Why are Miller and Budweiser and Coors so hugely successful as beers? No one would say it's because they're the best-tasting or highest-quality beers in the world. They're not the cheapest either. So why are they popular? Because they are nonoffensive and they are exactly what you expect them to be. That's all. Everyone has a different favorite beer, so it is impossible to be 'the best' because 'best' is far too subjective. All you can reasonably hope to do is put out a product that doesn't offend anyone, and that delivers exactly according to expectations: it's not mind-blowing, but it's not a let-down either.
This is a major part of mass-market positioning in any industry. If you pick any particular reason why Windows and Office are successful - the look and feel is familiar, the interface is intuitive, things are where you expect them to be, there is widespread hardware support, and on and on, and then look carefully you'll find that they all end up being part of this same mass-market pattern.
As another example to illustrate my point, I just recently installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop - the first Linux distro I've dual-booted in more than 5 years. I'm happy with it primarily because it just works. Look at what 'just works' means: it means it did what I expected without pissing me off. Ubuntu is based on GNOME, of course, and unlike the distros of my youth back in the 1990s whose unix GUIs were genuinely different, today's GNOME and KDE and other popular GUIs are essentially just clones or clone-hybrids of Windows and Mac OS. And THAT is why they're starting to get mass-market penetration and why they're starting to be successful. The mass-market doesn't want or need a Ferrari or Rolls Royce to go to the grocery store. The mass-market wants a reliable minivan or SUV. For far too long Linux distros tried to be either a Ferrari, Rolls or Humvee, and market share accurately reflected the reality of this marketing strategy.
Broadband is a good example of a classic argument: should we let private industry meet the demand for an essential public service?
Private industry, in theory, is supposed to be more efficient and more innovative. The problem is, the data just doesn't support this for most essential public services because the monolithic nature of these industries lend themselves to monopolies, oligopolies, cartels and market failure. Looking at data from all over the world and not just from the US, it is pretty clear that if a society is serious about getting essential services to every citizen, the government - for all its inefficiencies and foibles - is a better bet.
We often talk as if private corproations or nationalized industries are the only options, but there is a third option: the nonprofit sector. Unfortunately, it seldom gets discussed. It's too bad too, as there are some interesting advantages. A private, commercial nonprofit could compete in the open market and retain the efficiencies mandated by self-suffiency (or it would just die - this kind of nonprofit isn't supported by donations but by its own revenue). But without an overarching mission to maximize profit, it's actual mission would just be it's stated mission, and so, for example, people out on farms who are less profitable customers might be more likely to get services rolled out to them.
Exactly. I hate to seem like a tinfoil hat crazy person, but cui bono? Who stands to profit? Well, Microsoft and Intel et al obviously stand to profit if users must buy a new computer in order to run new software. Since when have people upgraded their OS without upgrading their hardware? The market just doesn't do that, as a general rule. So, how to force them to? Make the OS require a new computer. Then you lock in a hardware+software update cycle, not just in individual consumers but also with corporate customers. The only problem is that sometimes it doesn't work, and the new OS ends up being a wrench in the works. And that's Vista's situation.
I may be a nerd by I know nothing of the real inner workings of OS software. Can someone please explain in detail why Vista runs slowly even on new machines? To me - in my ignorance - it seems that the power of hardware (processing and memory in particular) has vastly outpaced the demands of software. Since it doesn't seem like Vista is doing things that are 1,000+ times more demanding than the things 3.11 did, I don't understand why it doesn't perform all its functions more or less instantaneously.
Everyone I know has a computer capable of performing several billion calculations per second on the CPU, something comparable on the GPU, and at least 1GB of extremely fast RAM. Yet the first mouse-driven GUI I used was on the amiga 500 which had a 7 Mhz processor and 512 Kb of slow RAM. And while it obviously didn't do everything Vista does, what it did do it did perfectly well. Again, I just don't see a 1,000+ fold increase in the features of the OS to keep pace with the hardware development.
The point was is that, there are things that are definitely inside the scope of reality (black holes) and there are things that very probably are within the scope of reality (universe beyond the observable universe) that are unobservable/unknowable to humans.
I'll restate my point once more for clarity: anything that is by definition unknowable AND unable to affect our reality/universe is irrelevant to us. That's it. Yes, there are things that are unknown. There may be things that are unknowable. But these things, like the exotic objects of quantum physics you mention, do have an affect on our reality/universe. This is not in dispute.
You are getting lost and confused when the idea of God comes into the picture. One of the central tenets of the ontological argument and other defenses of the existence of God is that God is both unknowable by direct observation AND unknowable by indirect observation of his actions. Well here's some breaking news: that makes God unreal. And like I said before, nothing unreal exists.
The reason why the idea of God is a load of crap is that there is no way to know whether God is active in our reality/universe or not. Religious nutjobs twist this to two malevolent and irrational ends: 1) They use it to cloak God in mystery, hence "God works in mysterious ways", and thereby justify or explain a la carte anything they wish to attribute to Divine Intervention; and 2) They turn right around and claim that they know God: they know what God wants you to eat, who God wants you to sleep with, what makes God happy, what displeases God, what he wants from us, what he has promised us, etc, etc.
we have to just stipulate they're answered in order to make almost any arguments at all
That is largely correct. The key word I used was corroborates, and the 'ism' you're looking for is probably "coherentism". If the evidence - including evidence from experience a la Descartes, with certain qualifications - corroborates a hypothesis about reality, then that hypothesis is functionally indistinguishable from what is true. That doesn't necessarily mean it is actually true, but in practice that is irrelevant, as I alluded to in my mention of the Matrix, et al. This logic is circular, hence it is self-coherent, hence coherentism.
You're probably familiar with the two most popular forms of coherentism. One is self-consistent but totally inconsistent with reality, and it is called religion. The other is self-consistent AND totally consistent with observable reality, and it is called science.
beings outside the observable universe would know things we cannot
Go back and read what I wrote again. There is no domain outside of reality. Anything 'outside' the universe would just be... part of the universe. Therefore, nothing unreal exists; in other words, anything that is real is part of reality. Could anything exist outside of reality? Who cares? Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unknowable and inable to have any affect upon reality, and therefore is of no signficance to us anyway.
This seems to be a very difficult concept for some religious people to understand. See Daniel Dennett for a more thorough attempt to explain this concept.
Like most central religious texts, the Qu'ran has a lot of good and bad in it.
Maybe you missed the part in the Quran where it says it was dictated to the Prophet Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel, and as such is the absolute, final and inerrant word of God. That leaves no wiggle-room for "some good stuff, some bad stuff". You aren't reading the Quran the way a Muslim reads it, and certainly not the way a suicide bomber reads it. You are the one who is grossly misinterpreting it.
I appreciate your insightful responses, though I don't agree with everything you say. One point to follow on, though:
coherentism could be rationally justified if we were able to come up with a well-defined distinction between fallacious circular reasoning and non-fallacious circular reasoning
There is a simple litmus test for coherentism: is it consistent with observable reality? If it is, it is indistinguishable from truth. Voila, you have just discovered Science.
how do you reconcile your opinion on people with religious beliefs with the significant proportion of world-changing scientists (that is, nearly all of them) who have religious convictions?
You did respond to my original post about compartmentalization of the brain and the schizophrenic nature of being simultaneously rational and irrational, did you not? Or perhaps you have memory and comprehension issues as well?
It should be obvious that making absolute claims about the truth values of unknowns is poor logic.
Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unknowable AND incapable of affecting reality. Were it otherwise, said thing would simply be another part of reality. Could there be 'something' unknowable and incapable of affecting reality 'out there' somewhere? Who cares? It doesn't matter - by definition - because we would never know and reality would be unaffected by it.
So I repeat my assertion: the problem with religion is that it makes pernicious claims not just about imaginary, unreal things but also about reality that are patently false. And those claims have destructive consequences on human behavior.
I don't claim to be a Quranic expert. For a genuinely expert thrashing of the barbaric, nonsensical Crap that is the Quran, I'll simply refer you to Sam Harris.
If reality were NOT only 'the Seen,' then how would you know if you were wrong?
You seem to be confusing the analogy with reality. 'Seeing' is a metaphor. Children learn that things continue to exist even when we aren't observing them by playing peek-a-boo. You're trying to apply this to reality itself, and that is logically flawed. Reality is what is real - what the doofus poster called 'The Seen'. But there is nothing that is not real. Why? Because what is is what is real; reality is what is. Nothing unreal exists. QED. There's not much more I can do to explain this. It's one of those things you either understand or you don't. Religious people often exhibit this failure of comprehension. They think there is another 'reality' outside of our own; that there is somehow a Creator who exists outside of creation. But there isn't. Because reality is everything, and anything real that was outside of reality would... just be a part of reality. Get it?
Anyone who thinks that critical thinking happens in the absence of unprovable postulates has never done any critical thinking. Everything from "I exist" to "Time flows" to "Cause and effect exists" to "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" is just as much an unprovable (and impossible to disprove) assumption as "The universe has a first cause" or "We persist after death" or "All of this has meaning."
Nonsense. By your lights, critical thinking is in principle impossible given the existence of 'unprovable postulates'. "I exist" and "Time flows" and "Cause and effect exists" and "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" are all testable and can all be corroborated with evidence. To the extent that they cannot 'really' be proven or known, which is to say the extent to which reality itself may be an illusion - a Matrix-style simulation, a dream, etc - is irrelevant because reality itself is the only context within which anything is meaningful. Within the context of what is real, the logic and consistency of evidence do matter insofar as they enable an understanding of how reality works. And by corollary, there is simply no such thing as 'outside the context of what is real'. If you disagree, I suggest you contemplate the fact that you are using a computer - a fantastically sophisticated testament to our ability to 'actually' understand reality - to write your comments. Your frittering crap about unprovable first principles is of no relevance.
You ignore the influence of religion on Renaissance to Industrial Age science -- how it led people to ask, "How did God wrought the universe." You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome. Instead, religion is nothing more than superstition, irrationality, and the elevation of positions born from ignorance in your eyes
I made no claims about the historical significance of religion, nor of its functional utility. Believing in the toothfairy may have profoundly affected history, and it may be useful and meaningful to millions of people. That doesn't lend the slightest credence to the assertion that it is true. And that's the toothfairy. Last time a checked, no Toothfairyists were blowing up children with carbombs.
you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran
Yes, I do. The problem with dogma is that it is blinding. The nonsensical rant from the Devout Believer I was responding to was a perfect testament to the power of dogma, and the need to dispel the blindness it causes with clear and critical thinking. And just in case you missed the memo, the "Argument from Authority" carries no weight in rational discourse: the fact that this guy is a Muslim is irrelevant. Or would you just as happily claim that all Christians in the redneck South are expert Biblical scholars simply by virtue of being Christian?
the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here
If I studied Superman comic books every week, it wouldn't make them one iota more legitimate as a guide to building a civil society or as a guide to understanding reality. All of my criticism of the Quran stands.
pure reason won't bring you any sort of ethics, much less the same ethics we have
You need to do some reading outside of undergraduate ethics courses. While it is of course true that there is no way to prove such precepts as "suffering is bad," such proofs are no more necessary to building a rational ethics than proofs of mathematical precepts are necessary to a rational geometry. Goedel, for example, showed that this is not only unnecessary but in fact impossible to do. Nevertheless, geometry remains utterly rational.
A functionally rational ethics builds upon a set of simple tenets that are, both in principle and in practice, exceedingly easy to agree upon: minimize suffering and maximize joy in the present, optimize sustainability for the future, etc. The Golden Rule does much to capture this logic, and it is a concept easily understood by a child of five. As it happens, it is also largely absent within and wholly contradicted by the tenets of Islam.
Cultural relativism is an easy fallback for those who fear political incorrectness and find it more comfortable to debate whether destructive or constructive behavior can be valued as good or bad from first principles rather than actually moving toward a workable, rational ethics for the 21st Century. This is a cheap dodge that opts you out of a important discussion: if we agree that living is better than not living, then how should we live? (You could fall back to your cheap ploy and claim you have no ability to determine in principle with living is better than not living, in which case I cordially invite you to test both for yourself and see which you prefer).
The other issue you raise is about 'tension' between rational thinking and irrational beliefs. Your assertion that there is no tension between them is nonsense: rational and irrational thinking are conflicting and mutually exclusive modes of dealing with reality. The standards of evidence held by suicide bombers, for example, are laughable next to the rigors of evidence adhered to by physicists and other scientists. And as we have all too painfuly seen, the actions taken on the basis of these standards of evidence have very real consequences. It is possible to be both rational and irrational, as I mention in my previous post; but to do so you must be slightly insane.
You claim to know things about That Which Cannot Be Known. That is classic religious double-talk nonsense. Your comment is nothing but the gobbledegook of a crazy person.
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Now it's fine if you don't want a landlord to see your medical history or political affiliations. I'm not such a big fan of withholding information from (ie lying to) insurance companies about your medical history or doing the same with your criminal record with employers and landlords, etc. But either way, if someone wants to find out about you and your past, the information is out there to be found. I don't see why a national ID would necessarily make this process any easier. Even if the information was all in one database, access to it could be controlled with perms. What's the big deal? Anyone seriously afraid of the Gubmint snooping on their private life is SOL - the Gubmint already has complete information on everyone anyway.
So if there's something major I'm missing, someone please school me on this!
You're quite right, sir. I stand corrected.
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso
What was that you were saying?
Always look at the bottom line. 9 cents on every tax dollar goes to paying down the debt: 9%. And of course at the end of the day that is the only rate that matters.
The issue I mentioned is only tangentially related with maximizing tax revenue - the Laffer curve is an intuitive and familiar concept thanks to the many parallels that can be found elsewhere in economics, such as maximizing profit through optimal pricing (margin too high, no turnover = no revenue; margin too low = no revenue). It is easier to think of deficit spending as debt-financing versus financing out of revenues. There are some operational advantages to deficit spending, but they are highly debatable and it is terribly, terribly easy for deficit spending to turn into a fiscally irresponsible nightmare, as several recent republican administrations have demonstrated. The place where the Laffer curve becomes relevant is that at some point there must be a source of revenue with which to pay off deficit spending. Perpetual deficit spending is - pardon the pun - a bankrupt policy.
Two other things worth mentioning:
1) Cui bono? Who profits? Corporate lobbyists pushing for deficit spending in the form of massive government contracts, subsidies and tax-credit payouts for their companies whose owners then loan the money the government needs to pay for them is not far from a racket. Here's an analogy: The Mob shows up at your corner store and says you need to buy 'protection'. It costs $100,000. You don't have $100,000. Ah, no problem. The Mob 'loans' you the money - at, say, 9% interest. See what I did there? Out of one pocket and into another, collecting 9 percent along the way. Deficit spending is essentially no different. Fancy theorectical economic crap aside, cui bono from deficit spending? The wealthy.
2) Taxation brackets are upside down anyway. There should be ZERO tax on all who earn under $50,000/year - that's half the adult working population, representing 150 million Americans. Total tax revenue lost? $35 billion - a pittance in scheme of the federal budget. If you want to boost consumer spending, kickstart the economy and rocket into the White House on a landslide victory, that's the beginning and end of your platform right there. The 150 million poorest Americans out there could give a shit about your other policies if it means paying no income tax.
So why is deficit spending attractive? For several reasons. Politically, it is easy to sell "lower taxes!" For the political Right, it is also a way to shovel money into the pockets of the wealthy: about 1/3 of the debt is loaned to the government by rich people in the form of verystable investments - T-Bills, bonds, etc - at around 9% interest.
It's too bad you don't work for Microsoft.
I think they often come at the beginning of very hard work too. I've had several Eureka moments in my life, which of course have emerged as products of the sum total of all my life experiences. After the initial epiphany they all required extended periods of intense work in order to be realized.
Now I'm no M$ fanboy, but I think there are some clear and simple explanations for Microsoft's enormous success aside from simply their OS and Office suite market dominance as a near-monopoly. In a nutshell, I think they all boil down to the mass-market effect. I'll invoke the American Beer Analogy here.
Why are Miller and Budweiser and Coors so hugely successful as beers? No one would say it's because they're the best-tasting or highest-quality beers in the world. They're not the cheapest either. So why are they popular? Because they are nonoffensive and they are exactly what you expect them to be. That's all. Everyone has a different favorite beer, so it is impossible to be 'the best' because 'best' is far too subjective. All you can reasonably hope to do is put out a product that doesn't offend anyone, and that delivers exactly according to expectations: it's not mind-blowing, but it's not a let-down either.
This is a major part of mass-market positioning in any industry. If you pick any particular reason why Windows and Office are successful - the look and feel is familiar, the interface is intuitive, things are where you expect them to be, there is widespread hardware support, and on and on, and then look carefully you'll find that they all end up being part of this same mass-market pattern.
As another example to illustrate my point, I just recently installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop - the first Linux distro I've dual-booted in more than 5 years. I'm happy with it primarily because it just works. Look at what 'just works' means: it means it did what I expected without pissing me off. Ubuntu is based on GNOME, of course, and unlike the distros of my youth back in the 1990s whose unix GUIs were genuinely different, today's GNOME and KDE and other popular GUIs are essentially just clones or clone-hybrids of Windows and Mac OS. And THAT is why they're starting to get mass-market penetration and why they're starting to be successful. The mass-market doesn't want or need a Ferrari or Rolls Royce to go to the grocery store. The mass-market wants a reliable minivan or SUV. For far too long Linux distros tried to be either a Ferrari, Rolls or Humvee, and market share accurately reflected the reality of this marketing strategy.
Private industry, in theory, is supposed to be more efficient and more innovative. The problem is, the data just doesn't support this for most essential public services because the monolithic nature of these industries lend themselves to monopolies, oligopolies, cartels and market failure. Looking at data from all over the world and not just from the US, it is pretty clear that if a society is serious about getting essential services to every citizen, the government - for all its inefficiencies and foibles - is a better bet.
We often talk as if private corproations or nationalized industries are the only options, but there is a third option: the nonprofit sector. Unfortunately, it seldom gets discussed. It's too bad too, as there are some interesting advantages. A private, commercial nonprofit could compete in the open market and retain the efficiencies mandated by self-suffiency (or it would just die - this kind of nonprofit isn't supported by donations but by its own revenue). But without an overarching mission to maximize profit, it's actual mission would just be it's stated mission, and so, for example, people out on farms who are less profitable customers might be more likely to get services rolled out to them.
Exactly. I hate to seem like a tinfoil hat crazy person, but cui bono? Who stands to profit? Well, Microsoft and Intel et al obviously stand to profit if users must buy a new computer in order to run new software. Since when have people upgraded their OS without upgrading their hardware? The market just doesn't do that, as a general rule. So, how to force them to? Make the OS require a new computer. Then you lock in a hardware+software update cycle, not just in individual consumers but also with corporate customers. The only problem is that sometimes it doesn't work, and the new OS ends up being a wrench in the works. And that's Vista's situation.
It's probably crazy, but it seems that way.
Everyone I know has a computer capable of performing several billion calculations per second on the CPU, something comparable on the GPU, and at least 1GB of extremely fast RAM. Yet the first mouse-driven GUI I used was on the amiga 500 which had a 7 Mhz processor and 512 Kb of slow RAM. And while it obviously didn't do everything Vista does, what it did do it did perfectly well. Again, I just don't see a 1,000+ fold increase in the features of the OS to keep pace with the hardware development.
Can someone school me on this?
Go live in the Muslim world for 20 years like I have and then you can lecture me about the civility of Islamic society.
I'll restate my point once more for clarity: anything that is by definition unknowable AND unable to affect our reality/universe is irrelevant to us. That's it. Yes, there are things that are unknown. There may be things that are unknowable. But these things, like the exotic objects of quantum physics you mention, do have an affect on our reality/universe. This is not in dispute.
You are getting lost and confused when the idea of God comes into the picture. One of the central tenets of the ontological argument and other defenses of the existence of God is that God is both unknowable by direct observation AND unknowable by indirect observation of his actions. Well here's some breaking news: that makes God unreal. And like I said before, nothing unreal exists.
The reason why the idea of God is a load of crap is that there is no way to know whether God is active in our reality/universe or not. Religious nutjobs twist this to two malevolent and irrational ends: 1) They use it to cloak God in mystery, hence "God works in mysterious ways", and thereby justify or explain a la carte anything they wish to attribute to Divine Intervention; and 2) They turn right around and claim that they know God: they know what God wants you to eat, who God wants you to sleep with, what makes God happy, what displeases God, what he wants from us, what he has promised us, etc, etc.
It. Is. All. A. Load. Of. Crap.
That is largely correct. The key word I used was corroborates, and the 'ism' you're looking for is probably "coherentism". If the evidence - including evidence from experience a la Descartes, with certain qualifications - corroborates a hypothesis about reality, then that hypothesis is functionally indistinguishable from what is true. That doesn't necessarily mean it is actually true, but in practice that is irrelevant, as I alluded to in my mention of the Matrix, et al. This logic is circular, hence it is self-coherent, hence coherentism.
You're probably familiar with the two most popular forms of coherentism. One is self-consistent but totally inconsistent with reality, and it is called religion. The other is self-consistent AND totally consistent with observable reality, and it is called science.
Go back and read what I wrote again. There is no domain outside of reality. Anything 'outside' the universe would just be ... part of the universe. Therefore, nothing unreal exists; in other words, anything that is real is part of reality. Could anything exist outside of reality? Who cares? Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unknowable and inable to have any affect upon reality, and therefore is of no signficance to us anyway.
This seems to be a very difficult concept for some religious people to understand. See Daniel Dennett for a more thorough attempt to explain this concept.
Maybe you missed the part in the Quran where it says it was dictated to the Prophet Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel, and as such is the absolute, final and inerrant word of God. That leaves no wiggle-room for "some good stuff, some bad stuff". You aren't reading the Quran the way a Muslim reads it, and certainly not the way a suicide bomber reads it. You are the one who is grossly misinterpreting it.
coherentism could be rationally justified if we were able to come up with a well-defined distinction between fallacious circular reasoning and non-fallacious circular reasoning
There is a simple litmus test for coherentism: is it consistent with observable reality? If it is, it is indistinguishable from truth. Voila, you have just discovered Science.
You did respond to my original post about compartmentalization of the brain and the schizophrenic nature of being simultaneously rational and irrational, did you not? Or perhaps you have memory and comprehension issues as well?
Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unknowable AND incapable of affecting reality. Were it otherwise, said thing would simply be another part of reality. Could there be 'something' unknowable and incapable of affecting reality 'out there' somewhere? Who cares? It doesn't matter - by definition - because we would never know and reality would be unaffected by it.
So I repeat my assertion: the problem with religion is that it makes pernicious claims not just about imaginary, unreal things but also about reality that are patently false. And those claims have destructive consequences on human behavior.
I don't claim to be a Quranic expert. For a genuinely expert thrashing of the barbaric, nonsensical Crap that is the Quran, I'll simply refer you to Sam Harris.
You seem to be confusing the analogy with reality. 'Seeing' is a metaphor. Children learn that things continue to exist even when we aren't observing them by playing peek-a-boo. You're trying to apply this to reality itself, and that is logically flawed. Reality is what is real - what the doofus poster called 'The Seen'. But there is nothing that is not real. Why? Because what is is what is real; reality is what is. Nothing unreal exists. QED. There's not much more I can do to explain this. It's one of those things you either understand or you don't. Religious people often exhibit this failure of comprehension. They think there is another 'reality' outside of our own; that there is somehow a Creator who exists outside of creation. But there isn't. Because reality is everything, and anything real that was outside of reality would ... just be a part of reality. Get it?
Nonsense. By your lights, critical thinking is in principle impossible given the existence of 'unprovable postulates'. "I exist" and "Time flows" and "Cause and effect exists" and "The information my senses provide me is accurate and true" are all testable and can all be corroborated with evidence. To the extent that they cannot 'really' be proven or known, which is to say the extent to which reality itself may be an illusion - a Matrix-style simulation, a dream, etc - is irrelevant because reality itself is the only context within which anything is meaningful. Within the context of what is real, the logic and consistency of evidence do matter insofar as they enable an understanding of how reality works. And by corollary, there is simply no such thing as 'outside the context of what is real'. If you disagree, I suggest you contemplate the fact that you are using a computer - a fantastically sophisticated testament to our ability to 'actually' understand reality - to write your comments. Your frittering crap about unprovable first principles is of no relevance.
You ignore the influence of religion on Renaissance to Industrial Age science -- how it led people to ask, "How did God wrought the universe." You ignore the influence of even Islam on preserving the maths and sciences of the ancient Greeks after the fall of Rome. Instead, religion is nothing more than superstition, irrationality, and the elevation of positions born from ignorance in your eyes
I made no claims about the historical significance of religion, nor of its functional utility. Believing in the toothfairy may have profoundly affected history, and it may be useful and meaningful to millions of people. That doesn't lend the slightest credence to the assertion that it is true. And that's the toothfairy. Last time a checked, no Toothfairyists were blowing up children with carbombs.
you presume to lecture a Muslim on the Qu'ran
Yes, I do. The problem with dogma is that it is blinding. The nonsensical rant from the Devout Believer I was responding to was a perfect testament to the power of dogma, and the need to dispel the blindness it causes with clear and critical thinking. And just in case you missed the memo, the "Argument from Authority" carries no weight in rational discourse: the fact that this guy is a Muslim is irrelevant. Or would you just as happily claim that all Christians in the redneck South are expert Biblical scholars simply by virtue of being Christian?
the guy who studies the book every week at his mosque is obviously the one arguing from a position of dogmatic ignorance here
If I studied Superman comic books every week, it wouldn't make them one iota more legitimate as a guide to building a civil society or as a guide to understanding reality. All of my criticism of the Quran stands.
You need to do some reading outside of undergraduate ethics courses. While it is of course true that there is no way to prove such precepts as "suffering is bad," such proofs are no more necessary to building a rational ethics than proofs of mathematical precepts are necessary to a rational geometry. Goedel, for example, showed that this is not only unnecessary but in fact impossible to do. Nevertheless, geometry remains utterly rational.
A functionally rational ethics builds upon a set of simple tenets that are, both in principle and in practice, exceedingly easy to agree upon: minimize suffering and maximize joy in the present, optimize sustainability for the future, etc. The Golden Rule does much to capture this logic, and it is a concept easily understood by a child of five. As it happens, it is also largely absent within and wholly contradicted by the tenets of Islam.
Cultural relativism is an easy fallback for those who fear political incorrectness and find it more comfortable to debate whether destructive or constructive behavior can be valued as good or bad from first principles rather than actually moving toward a workable, rational ethics for the 21st Century. This is a cheap dodge that opts you out of a important discussion: if we agree that living is better than not living, then how should we live? (You could fall back to your cheap ploy and claim you have no ability to determine in principle with living is better than not living, in which case I cordially invite you to test both for yourself and see which you prefer).
The other issue you raise is about 'tension' between rational thinking and irrational beliefs. Your assertion that there is no tension between them is nonsense: rational and irrational thinking are conflicting and mutually exclusive modes of dealing with reality. The standards of evidence held by suicide bombers, for example, are laughable next to the rigors of evidence adhered to by physicists and other scientists. And as we have all too painfuly seen, the actions taken on the basis of these standards of evidence have very real consequences. It is possible to be both rational and irrational, as I mention in my previous post; but to do so you must be slightly insane.
You claim to know things about That Which Cannot Be Known. That is classic religious double-talk nonsense. Your comment is nothing but the gobbledegook of a crazy person.