You term it "fundamental disagreement", I term it "fundamental hypocrisy". We are clearly able to think across different epistemological domains with different rules, without an issue.
I would like the opportunity to ask one of these "evangelistic atheists" (yes, "opportunity"--if you think the context of discussion in a church is constrained, that is nothing next to a professor presenting his/her views) which political party is proven correct--and if that was the one they voted for.
To go farther than this would seem to be belaboring the point that every single scientist, every single day, makes dozens of decisions and conclusions upon incomplete information and untestable premises.
No. There is no issue with saying "sin" is defined as disobedience to God, and regardless of how many pre-Adam hominids there were, they had no directive from God, and hence did not sin.
This does not, however, mean they were not philosophical notions of "immoral". It also does not mean we cannot consider them within a non-moral-agent "animal" framework (as is comfortable on at least a factual level to all stances of evolution), and consider them amoral.
In such an overall metaphysical construct, pre-Adamics had no possibility of "sinning" in a theological sense, nor was the issue of eternal salvation relevant to them. As one might gather from the remarkably sparse references to an afterlife, that is, reading the book, they would simply be a class of being that was given their lifetime Earthly existence, and that's all that was offered, and all that needed to be offered.
I'll leave it here, though, there is much, much more insight to be gained should you choose to ponder this a while, and it won't take even that long to realize you are in precisely the definitional box you demand, and the only issue with science is -your- irrationality in insisting that even in a Darwinian model, you have some justification for considering yourself a morally-unique collection of DNA, while simultaneously denying it with respect to what God "should do".
In brief, theism has no issues here. Yours is a teetering, unworkable construct that only works momentarily by you mentally evading your own necessary inferences of your own position.
As the ieee.org link suggests, and even helpfully illustrates, I agree your right hand would be optimally convenient for our "Biometric Wallet", to enabl^H^H^H^H^Hsimplify all buying and selling.
Or maybe your forehead, so you have a second alternative so you know you're free to choose your personal preferences.
Well, since I was a developer at Coldwell Banker a few years back, whose worldwide real estate search and "tour" sites were running handily on.NET and SQL Server, I happen to know directly that it was a relatively-small percentage that were built on sand and swamp. But you could filter those out by price range.;)
"There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die not become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
--Gospel of Thomas
There you go.
The metaphor-challenged may not "see it", and if not, that's how it should be, and Darwin will take care of you just fine.
Once again, though, the majority of theistic stances have no problem with "evolution occurs", and this False Dichotomy is getting old.
No, my characterization is the -required inference- from their stance on religion, which -contradicts- their own stance, as well as evolutionary theory. My restatement is not what their position on evolution -is-, but rather what it -must be- for consistency with their other stances. As I said, it's a Reductio which also, conveniently, points out the self-contradiction as well.
Neither Dawkins nor Hitchens has ever said any such thing, nothing even remotely like it, nothing that could be reduced to that.
"God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"
Really? How about something -precisely like that- as the very -title- of one of his books?
So, back to the point, when/where was this idyllic "everything" that then became "poisoned" by religion? If he's going to argue the relative preference for his made-up void of the never-existed, he should be more specific.
Your argument is that if a fallacious argument is presented, -demonstrating it's self-contradictory nature- is itself a Straw Man, because that by definition alters it. There is no way to maintain both the premise -and- the conclusion unchanged, even when the argument is entirely erroneous, without rendering it differently. You're essentially claiming that if I claim "I can fly because of my magic ring", and you then systematically refute my conclusion that I can fly as derived from the premise of my ring, that -you- have the problem because you changing "can fly" to "demonstrably can't fly" is straw manning my argument, because you changed "can" to "can't".
I think you're confusing "weakened restatement of an opposing position" with "noting the absurd (also being self-contradictory is just a bonus here) conclusions required by the opposing position".
The first is a Straw Man. The second is a Reductio Ad Absurdum. The first is a fallacy, the second is a refutation.
Wait, wait... you're messing with Slashdot's standard Dawkins-Hitchens understanding that evolution works by the mechanisms of rainbows and lollypops, and all evil started with the creation of religion.
Self-refuting arguments aren't as amusing as self-eliminating arguments, though, I find.
In the 1800's, the scales tipped in favor of Cambridge. After the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945...
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
--Gospel of Thomas
...I'm not sure there was actually any decision between the two there to be made.
Overall, though, I'm quite in agreement with your post...
Posting an objection on behalf of the guy from 234 AD.
"And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day . . . and of the [great] lights and stars upon the fourth . . . we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world..."
I was referencing observations. Healings, converting water into wine, resurrection, that sort of thing. Observables. There would be no distinction between what we would say is miraculous and what they would say is miraculous. For your second reference, for your point to hold -all- instances of it raining would be so noted, they are not. This is clearly given as a special event for something that, believing it or not, we would still agree would be miraculous -if it occurred-, and the latter belief isn't necessary to understand that claiming earlier man considered most everything specially miraculous, that is, had not the distinctions between natural-order and not that "modern man" has, is false.
I have no issue with using "heaven" and "heavens" in multiple senses, much as we do to this day with astronomy, by the way, nor is the notion of "windows" within a book that is already a sea of obvious allegory, to make understandable a currently-causally-indiscernable "emergent" phenomenon either inaccurate or conflicting with what we can causally-perceive from science--as I see it. Quantum effects can cause absolutely anything materially to happen, just improbably so--and no, you do not know what this means causally "behind that".
But they are related from memory during ordinary waking consciousness. When reconstructing the event as a narrative in order to communicate it, people fall back on the experiences they were taught.
You would have to describe what you are suggesting here more. During EEG flatline, nothing referencing any sort of cognition can be brought into the discussion from a naturalistic perspective. I, naturally, don't agree that because someone's read about a metaphysical place that's sufficient to have a very-compelling-as-actual-experience 3-dimensional, auditory, interpersonal, interactive brain-crash-simulation of it, if that's what you're suggesting.
I have never made any such claim. If you disagree, please provide a quote. Otherwise, you are being dishonest.
Okay, what does "your observation" refer to here? You appear to be using it in a generalized fashion--"observations" per se. You don't know the scope of "observations" humanity has had, but appear instead to be just arbitrarily limiting ourselves to -your- observations. If I misunderstood, please elaborate, as it isn't my intent to be other than straightforward and it wasn't me who, so far, has goalpost-shifted from "not equally plausible as the FSM" to "I'm still have an objection about one of your bases for distinction".
You can still apply Occam's Razor. If, instead of supposing there is a supernatural being, you can explain this observation without a supernatural being, Occam's Razor implies that that explanation is more practically useful.
No, you can't, except by fiat. We do not agree that the scope of phenomena to be explained is the same, and there is no reason to a priori accept your scope. Different phenomena, different models, for which Occam's Razor becomes irrelevant and appropriately takes a back seat.
So we'd expect that the apperance of the FSM or Jesus in a near death experience would correlate with the prevalence of those memes in our society.
No, we wouldn't "expect that", except by your sheer conjecture. These experiences are often during EEG flatline, for which any previous "suggestion" is directly inapplicable for explanatory power. Aside from that, you are providing no mechanism by which "previous suggestions" should or could be vividly experienced not as memory, but as present facts, due in particular to brain failure. You are not addressing the non-correlation of experiences to previous worldview across religions. You are not addressing knowledge of the environment presented afterward that should have been unattainable while unconscious. You have a weak association here, nothing more.
Since we can explain your observation without the use of any gods, your observation cannot be used as evidence that there are any gods or that one is more likely to exist than another.
You should probably try applying your analysis to your own psychic claim here, that your observations contain everyone on Earth's observations. Until then, it's epistemologically invalid--your experiences are never synonymous with everyone's experiences.
Leaving your incorrect restatement of what I said aside, what issue to you have with my analogy, given it is also simple fact? Homosexual promiscuity has propagated AIDS.
We can get into other more-nuanced distinctions between then and now, such as available methods of birth control, but that's aside my point here. That point was that the characterization of "stoning gays" is incorrect.
...especially between the Old and New Testaments (e.g. stoning gays vs. loving one another).
Firstly, there is nothing regarding "stoning gays" in the bible. There is such a response to promiscuous gay sex, much as there is for forms of heterosexual sex seen as damaging to the culture. There is nothing at all said about gay -orientation- per se... you're avoiding the actual issue through selective scoping of the term.
I think the overall ethical model you are looking for here is Utilitarianism--"the greatest good for the greatest many". It is not necessarily the action furthering "love" of a particular individual that best serves "love" per se, if they are in direct conflict in a given social context--much like we'd have no issue with censuring intentional propagation of a deadly disease for the sole justification of personal pleasure, if there wasn't the common "reasoning" of "religion says X, so focus on the opposite being actually what's good, because it's not religion, even if my behavior is objectively damaging to society in purely secular terms as well".
I suggest you do some reading on Occam's Razor as well, since you are using it incorrectly. Occam's Razor neither does nor ever has said anything about truth-status or plausibility, but rather practical preference of the simpler of otherwise-equal models for conceptual economy.
And no, they aren't equally plausible. If you'd like a link to a peer-reviewed study of NDE experiences quite lacking in FSM-related attributes, or would like to compare relative predictive success regarding future events, or the number of people claiming to be have witnessed or experienced supernatural effects attributable to the FSM, let me know.
Except, this is just a fanciful notion of history promulgated by Dawkins et al, and has nothing to do with actual history.
Review the documents. Precisely the same things we would consider "miraculous" today, were the things being considered "miraculous" then. That there was a standard baseline expected order to events was not a point of confusion. It makes no difference whether you consider "miracles" to exist or not here, to note the inaccurate statement of history.
Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!
Slashdot Mirror
You term it "fundamental disagreement", I term it "fundamental hypocrisy". We are clearly able to think across different epistemological domains with different rules, without an issue.
I would like the opportunity to ask one of these "evangelistic atheists" (yes, "opportunity"--if you think the context of discussion in a church is constrained, that is nothing next to a professor presenting his/her views) which political party is proven correct--and if that was the one they voted for.
To go farther than this would seem to be belaboring the point that every single scientist, every single day, makes dozens of decisions and conclusions upon incomplete information and untestable premises.
No. There is no issue with saying "sin" is defined as disobedience to God, and regardless of how many pre-Adam hominids there were, they had no directive from God, and hence did not sin.
This does not, however, mean they were not philosophical notions of "immoral". It also does not mean we cannot consider them within a non-moral-agent "animal" framework (as is comfortable on at least a factual level to all stances of evolution), and consider them amoral.
In such an overall metaphysical construct, pre-Adamics had no possibility of "sinning" in a theological sense, nor was the issue of eternal salvation relevant to them. As one might gather from the remarkably sparse references to an afterlife, that is, reading the book, they would simply be a class of being that was given their lifetime Earthly existence, and that's all that was offered, and all that needed to be offered.
I'll leave it here, though, there is much, much more insight to be gained should you choose to ponder this a while, and it won't take even that long to realize you are in precisely the definitional box you demand, and the only issue with science is -your- irrationality in insisting that even in a Darwinian model, you have some justification for considering yourself a morally-unique collection of DNA, while simultaneously denying it with respect to what God "should do".
In brief, theism has no issues here. Yours is a teetering, unworkable construct that only works momentarily by you mentally evading your own necessary inferences of your own position.
As the ieee.org link suggests, and even helpfully illustrates, I agree your right hand would be optimally convenient for our "Biometric Wallet", to enabl^H^H^H^H^Hsimplify all buying and selling.
Or maybe your forehead, so you have a second alternative so you know you're free to choose your personal preferences.
Oh wait.
Well, since I was a developer at Coldwell Banker a few years back, whose worldwide real estate search and "tour" sites were running handily on .NET and SQL Server, I happen to know directly that it was a relatively-small percentage that were built on sand and swamp. But you could filter those out by price range. ;)
It isn't terribly surprising that Mono is abandoning Silverlight, since Microsoft seems to be doing much the same in favor of HTML 5.
The .NET Framework and tools in totality are a different story, though.
By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.
"There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die not become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
--Gospel of Thomas
There you go.
The metaphor-challenged may not "see it", and if not, that's how it should be, and Darwin will take care of you just fine.
Once again, though, the majority of theistic stances have no problem with "evolution occurs", and this False Dichotomy is getting old.
I eat heavy metal
Gargle premium gas
I drink heavy water
Nitro-demitasse
Well, sorry you don't understand how logical fallacies work. About all I can say at this point.
I addressed this further in the above response.
No, my characterization is the -required inference- from their stance on religion, which -contradicts- their own stance, as well as evolutionary theory. My restatement is not what their position on evolution -is-, but rather what it -must be- for consistency with their other stances. As I said, it's a Reductio which also, conveniently, points out the self-contradiction as well.
Neither Dawkins nor Hitchens has ever said any such thing, nothing even remotely like it, nothing that could be reduced to that.
"God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"
Really? How about something -precisely like that- as the very -title- of one of his books?
So, back to the point, when/where was this idyllic "everything" that then became "poisoned" by religion? If he's going to argue the relative preference for his made-up void of the never-existed, he should be more specific.
Your argument is that if a fallacious argument is presented, -demonstrating it's self-contradictory nature- is itself a Straw Man, because that by definition alters it. There is no way to maintain both the premise -and- the conclusion unchanged, even when the argument is entirely erroneous, without rendering it differently. You're essentially claiming that if I claim "I can fly because of my magic ring", and you then systematically refute my conclusion that I can fly as derived from the premise of my ring, that -you- have the problem because you changing "can fly" to "demonstrably can't fly" is straw manning my argument, because you changed "can" to "can't".
No.
I suggest taking a look at the warning at the bottom here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
I think you're confusing "weakened restatement of an opposing position" with "noting the absurd (also being self-contradictory is just a bonus here) conclusions required by the opposing position".
The first is a Straw Man. The second is a Reductio Ad Absurdum. The first is a fallacy, the second is a refutation.
Wait, wait... you're messing with Slashdot's standard Dawkins-Hitchens understanding that evolution works by the mechanisms of rainbows and lollypops, and all evil started with the creation of religion.
Self-refuting arguments aren't as amusing as self-eliminating arguments, though, I find.
In the 1800's, the scales tipped in favor of Cambridge. After the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945...
...I'm not sure there was actually any decision between the two there to be made.
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
--Gospel of Thomas
Overall, though, I'm quite in agreement with your post...
Posting an objection on behalf of the guy from 234 AD.
"And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day . . . and of the [great] lights and stars upon the fourth . . . we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world..."
--Origen of Alexandria
I was referencing observations. Healings, converting water into wine, resurrection, that sort of thing. Observables. There would be no distinction between what we would say is miraculous and what they would say is miraculous. For your second reference, for your point to hold -all- instances of it raining would be so noted, they are not. This is clearly given as a special event for something that, believing it or not, we would still agree would be miraculous -if it occurred-, and the latter belief isn't necessary to understand that claiming earlier man considered most everything specially miraculous, that is, had not the distinctions between natural-order and not that "modern man" has, is false.
I have no issue with using "heaven" and "heavens" in multiple senses, much as we do to this day with astronomy, by the way, nor is the notion of "windows" within a book that is already a sea of obvious allegory, to make understandable a currently-causally-indiscernable "emergent" phenomenon either inaccurate or conflicting with what we can causally-perceive from science--as I see it. Quantum effects can cause absolutely anything materially to happen, just improbably so--and no, you do not know what this means causally "behind that".
But they are related from memory during ordinary waking consciousness. When reconstructing the event as a narrative in order to communicate it, people fall back on the experiences they were taught.
You would have to describe what you are suggesting here more. During EEG flatline, nothing referencing any sort of cognition can be brought into the discussion from a naturalistic perspective. I, naturally, don't agree that because someone's read about a metaphysical place that's sufficient to have a very-compelling-as-actual-experience 3-dimensional, auditory, interpersonal, interactive brain-crash-simulation of it, if that's what you're suggesting.
I have never made any such claim. If you disagree, please provide a quote. Otherwise, you are being dishonest.
Okay, what does "your observation" refer to here? You appear to be using it in a generalized fashion--"observations" per se. You don't know the scope of "observations" humanity has had, but appear instead to be just arbitrarily limiting ourselves to -your- observations. If I misunderstood, please elaborate, as it isn't my intent to be other than straightforward and it wasn't me who, so far, has goalpost-shifted from "not equally plausible as the FSM" to "I'm still have an objection about one of your bases for distinction".
Sorry that you don't know what "rational" means.
You can still apply Occam's Razor. If, instead of supposing there is a supernatural being, you can explain this observation without a supernatural being, Occam's Razor implies that that explanation is more practically useful.
No, you can't, except by fiat. We do not agree that the scope of phenomena to be explained is the same, and there is no reason to a priori accept your scope. Different phenomena, different models, for which Occam's Razor becomes irrelevant and appropriately takes a back seat.
So we'd expect that the apperance of the FSM or Jesus in a near death experience would correlate with the prevalence of those memes in our society.
No, we wouldn't "expect that", except by your sheer conjecture. These experiences are often during EEG flatline, for which any previous "suggestion" is directly inapplicable for explanatory power. Aside from that, you are providing no mechanism by which "previous suggestions" should or could be vividly experienced not as memory, but as present facts, due in particular to brain failure. You are not addressing the non-correlation of experiences to previous worldview across religions. You are not addressing knowledge of the environment presented afterward that should have been unattainable while unconscious. You have a weak association here, nothing more.
Since we're now getting more detailed in this argument, though, I'd want to back these claims, with a peer-reviewed medical journal: Here's a link: http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
Since we can explain your observation without the use of any gods, your observation cannot be used as evidence that there are any gods or that one is more likely to exist than another.
You should probably try applying your analysis to your own psychic claim here, that your observations contain everyone on Earth's observations. Until then, it's epistemologically invalid--your experiences are never synonymous with everyone's experiences.
Leaving your incorrect restatement of what I said aside, what issue to you have with my analogy, given it is also simple fact? Homosexual promiscuity has propagated AIDS.
We can get into other more-nuanced distinctions between then and now, such as available methods of birth control, but that's aside my point here. That point was that the characterization of "stoning gays" is incorrect.
...especially between the Old and New Testaments (e.g. stoning gays vs. loving one another).
Firstly, there is nothing regarding "stoning gays" in the bible. There is such a response to promiscuous gay sex, much as there is for forms of heterosexual sex seen as damaging to the culture. There is nothing at all said about gay -orientation- per se... you're avoiding the actual issue through selective scoping of the term.
I think the overall ethical model you are looking for here is Utilitarianism--"the greatest good for the greatest many". It is not necessarily the action furthering "love" of a particular individual that best serves "love" per se, if they are in direct conflict in a given social context--much like we'd have no issue with censuring intentional propagation of a deadly disease for the sole justification of personal pleasure, if there wasn't the common "reasoning" of "religion says X, so focus on the opposite being actually what's good, because it's not religion, even if my behavior is objectively damaging to society in purely secular terms as well".
I suggest you do some reading on Occam's Razor as well, since you are using it incorrectly. Occam's Razor neither does nor ever has said anything about truth-status or plausibility, but rather practical preference of the simpler of otherwise-equal models for conceptual economy.
And no, they aren't equally plausible. If you'd like a link to a peer-reviewed study of NDE experiences quite lacking in FSM-related attributes, or would like to compare relative predictive success regarding future events, or the number of people claiming to be have witnessed or experienced supernatural effects attributable to the FSM, let me know.
Counting the number of "analytic" people ascribing to a particular worldview doesn't mean anything.
Average people code in VB. The majority of analytical people code in C#. -Really- analytical people, the minority, code in C++.
Demographic breakdown purely for example, but what has been demonstrated by this line of reasoning? Nothing.
Except, this is just a fanciful notion of history promulgated by Dawkins et al, and has nothing to do with actual history.
Review the documents. Precisely the same things we would consider "miraculous" today, were the things being considered "miraculous" then. That there was a standard baseline expected order to events was not a point of confusion. It makes no difference whether you consider "miracles" to exist or not here, to note the inaccurate statement of history.
Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."
--Thomas
Hey, it's what I do here.
Well, at least we were forewarned.
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!
--Thomas