Why do you believe, what you believe?

[TheTaru]

I BELIEVE IN YOU, BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN ME, WHO BELIEVES IN YOU

Spoiler: show

http://images.absoluteanime.com/gurr...imon-adult.jpg

[Obev]

I BELIEVE IN YOU, BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN ME, WHO BELIEVES IN YOU

Spoiler: show

http://images.absoluteanime.com/gurr...imon-adult.jpg

Spiral reasoning works because spiral reasoning works because spiral reasoning works because spiral reasoning works because DO THE IMPOSSIBLE AND KICK REASON TO THE CURB THAT'S THE GURREN-DAN WAY.

[Max™]

Naive Anarchist, and I'd be a Theological Noncog if I didn't think Thor would godstomp the shit out of me for it.

http://i341.photobucket.com/albums/o...ru/beliefs.jpg

[Cheerios]

There aren't any scientists in Africa

[pahnphoenix]

It is not the same in the least. If you look at the milk carton in the fridge and see it is empty, you can safely state that you're out of milk. You can not, however, look up in the sky and see that you're out of God. God is not a thing you can touch, see or "feel" directly - and yet people believe that he exists. You can't draw the same conclusion about God, because you can't prove whether he exists or not. You can, however, open the fridge and prove that you're out of milk. If you're gonna compare statuses, it would be closer to comparing it to the sun rising tomorrow. Atheists are just as sure that there is no God as them believing the sun will rise tomorrow - and Christians are just as sure that there is a God as they are the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are positive they are correct, which makes it - in my opinion - rather moot to discuss, as there is no way to prove it either way.


Most words are agreed upon, though. We've given "1" a value it represents which is pretty much globally accepted, and we've agreed upon mathematical rules that a plus sign represents adding the two numbers and combining them in to a higher value, as noted by the equal sign which means the two sides of the equation should have equal value. In the same way we've decided what a fork is, what a knife is, what a car is etc. The only words that can be argued as to what they mean are adjectives (what's old to a 10-year old girl may not be old to you, for example), certain nouns - such as feelings - can also be interpreted different. A fork, a knife etc. is still a fork or a knife, even though they may be able to fulfill other tasks than what it was intended for, such as digging or killing. Walk forward, for example, can't really be argued that it can be done in several different ways, or be interpreted differently.

And you can't seriously say I make a logical error when I state you can't say the sun will rise every morning. If you truly have such a high degree in philosophy, you should know it goes against the very concept of logic used in philosophy.

i'm not going to argue this with you. you can be a crazy skeptic and doubt stuff like the origins of god myths, or my eyes' ability to tell whether or not there's eggs in the fridge or an illusion of eggs (or maybe there's an evil demon!). you never know anything with the same degree of certainty that you know logical truth, but logical truth is a small subset of the truth we know. indubitability does not matter.

it is not illogical to say that the sun will rise every morning. i know why the sun rises (the earth revolves around it, and spins). i have good reasons to believe it will rise again tomorrow. it would be illogical for me to NOT believe it. note: it would foolish of me to *even be agnostic about it*. i know the sun will rise again tomorrow. maybe i'm wrong. maybe i'll die, or the earth will explode. those "maybes" are true *for every fact about the world that you know*. don't be an idiot and say "then i know nothing." you don't know nothing. people who say that they "know nothing" because they can't achieve perfect certainty really just don't know a much simpler thing: the meaning of "know".

re: agreed upon words, i'm not reading that paragraph, because i'm not interested in your speculation about how language works. go to school, that's what i did. maybe i failed at learning and everything i took from it was wrong, but that's not going to be remedied by this messageboard, and i'm not going to teach you what i learned (mistakenly or otherwise) for free.

if i seem hostile, it's because i feel contempt for people who believe they find cute logical errors in people's reasoning, when they transparently are just overreacting to some phil 101 bullshit like hume's problem of induction.

@ zetanio or whoever, no, you didn't point out anything by substituting a word and then changing a not. yes, i am insulting you. your dumb paraphrase about a point too subtle for you to understand (but not very subtle) is insulting to me.

[Amastacia]

In response to the OP:

God is in the TV.

And the TV tells me Obama is a socialist.

[Correction]

Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.

This thread is fucking dumb.

[stewie]

Google is my god.

[Kaelan?]

Religion for example. I do not consider myself an atheist, but yet I do not believe in any god (nor am I a Buddhist). Why? Because in my opinion, Atheism by itself is a religion too. Atheism is, by its definition, the belief that there is no God(s).

(...)

Atheists are just as sure that there is no God as them believing the sun will rise tomorrow - and Christians are just as sure that there is a God as they are the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are positive they are correct, which makes it - in my opinion - rather moot to discuss, as there is no way to prove it either way.

No, that's not the definition. You're confusing not being convinced by a claim with actively making the opposite claim. The only thing required to be an atheist is the former - you can do the latter if you want, some people do and other people don't, but it's completely irrelevant to whether or not you're an atheist.

It's the difference between thinking someone is not guilty (i.e. not being convinced they are guilty) versus positively thinking they're innocent.

You're also assuming that not being able to prove (or disprove) something to a degree of absolute certainty makes you powerless to judge whether or not there are good reasons (i.e. evidence) to believe it or disbelieve it. Cue Russel's Teapot.

I don't really have any interest in starting (or continuing, I guess) a religious argument, but it does get on my nerves when people don't even understand the positions they're arguing against (and so many people make the same mistake you're making).

I'm just going to leave this here for clarification.

[Uzor]

i'm not going to argue this with you. you can be a crazy skeptic and doubt stuff like the origins of god myths, or my eyes' ability to tell whether or not there's eggs in the fridge or an illusion of eggs (or maybe there's an evil demon!). you never know anything with the same degree of certainty that you know logical truth, but logical truth is a small subset of the truth we know. indubitability does not matter.

I never once said you should doubt your eyes' ability to tell whether or not there's eggs in the fridge. Hell, I even said you can't compare it to the existence of God because you can quite clearly see whether or not you're out of eggs. If you're going to argue, don't make up things I've never once stated.

it is not illogical to say that the sun will rise every morning. i know why the sun rises (the earth revolves around it, and spins). i have good reasons to believe it will rise again tomorrow. it would be illogical for me to NOT believe it. note: it would foolish of me to *even be agnostic about it*. i know the sun will rise again tomorrow. maybe i'm wrong. maybe i'll die, or the earth will explode. those "maybes" are true *for every fact about the world that you know*. don't be an idiot and say "then i know nothing." you don't know nothing. people who say that they "know nothing" because they can't achieve perfect certainty really just don't know a much simpler thing: the meaning of "know".

It is illogical to say the sun will rise every morning, as I stated before. But that's quite difference from saying "I have good reason to believe it will rise again tomorrow", which you go on to say later. And again, I've never once stated "then I know nothing", and you're once again resorting to making things up in order to support your argument. I also never stated that I know nothing, what I said is that I don't assume everyone else is wrong because their knowledge conflicts with my own. That's quite difference from stating I consider myself "knowing nothing". Perhaps your "philosophy 101" tried to tell you that you know nothing and assume that that's my argument, I don't know, but I'd appreciate if you don't put words in my mouth.

No, that's not the definition. You're confusing not being convinced by a claim with actively making the opposite claim. The only thing required to be an atheist is the former - you can do the latter if you want, some people do and other people don't, but it's completely irrelevant to whether or not you're an atheist.

I'm not sure why you take that entirely out of context. I didn't state that that's the definition of Atheism. I also never stated that "Not being able to prove (or disprove) something to a degree of absolute certainty makes you powerless to judge whether or not there are good reasons (i.e. evidence) to believe it or disbelieve it.", and I've made no such assumptions. I stated that I - myself - don't like to make the assumption that I am correct in my belief in something unless I can prove or disprove it. I never said others shouldn't be free to make their own minds.

[Kaelan?]

I was addressing your claim that

Atheists are just as sure that there is no God as them believing the sun will rise tomorrow - and Christians are just as sure that there is a God as they are the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are positive they are correct

and that

Atheism is, by its definition, the belief that there is no God(s).

which are both wrong. It's the same as saying "someone who isn't convinced the defendant is guilty is by definition completely certain that the defendant is innocent". This attempt to equate atheism to a religion is nonsense. It's literally saying the not buying dogmatic religious claims (and pointing out the problems with them) somehow makes you equally dogmatic.

Your own position of rejecting religion due to not being convinced by its claims and stopping there is what atheism is. Anything else added on top of that is optional.

I had this discussion about Atheism with some roomies a while back and I fail to see how it's a religion. The chain of thought saying simply 'believing' in something makes it a religion doesn't make sense in itself, you wouldn't say there's a religion of Santa because kids believe in it, would you?

It's ever worse than that, actually. It would be as if your friends called not believing in Santa a religion.

[Ashmada]

It is not the same in the least. If you look at the milk carton in the fridge and see it is empty, you can safely state that you're out of milk. You can not, however, look up in the sky and see that you're out of God. God is not a thing you can touch, see or "feel" directly - and yet people believe that he exists. You can't draw the same conclusion about God, because you can't prove whether he exists or not. You can, however, open the fridge and prove that you're out of milk. If you're gonna compare statuses, it would be closer to comparing it to the sun rising tomorrow. Atheists are just as sure that there is no God as them believing the sun will rise tomorrow - and Christians are just as sure that there is a God as they are the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are positive they are correct, which makes it - in my opinion - rather moot to discuss, as there is no way to prove it either way.

1. It can be proven (and has been, many times) that the christian god does not exist.
Not empirically, but rationally.
There are several proofs, involving the attributes given to the christian god : they're quite simply incompatible with each other or even within themselves : omnibenevolence implies both absolute Justice and absolute Mercy, that's impossible.


2. A less-defined deist god cannot be disproven, but like many others on this board, you apparently need to familiarise yourself with Russell's Teapot.

Most atheists don't claim there is absolutely no god whatsoever, some of us simply make the claim that, in absence of proof, it is more sensible to assume non-existence than existence, as per the plurality of "sole gods", frivolous or not (judeo-christian, mulsim, various deist or animist gods, FSM, Invisible Pink Unicorn...)

If you want to discuss point 2., refer to the previous religious threads on here, several of us have expanded a lot on it, to little avail in general ; no point discussing it further.

On the other hand, if you've got a valid refutation of point 1. (the overall point, not the specific example), I'd be glad to read it.

Edit : typo.

[Kaelan?]

Most christians' response to 1. would go something like either "Well, yeah, but that's not the God I believe in, he can just do everything that's logically possible, not everything in general" if they're moderate or liberal (which is an obvious backpedalling and excuse making that I shouldn't have to point out) or "God is beyond logic!" or some other variation of "God works in mysterious ways" if they're a fundamentalist.

It's why I generally tend to stay away from logical arguments like this (though some of them still do have some value, like the euthyphro dillema), and would rather ask questions like "What do you believe in and why?" and go from there.

[pahnphoenix]

uzor,

please tell me what it means for it to be "illogical" to say something. you say it's illogical to say that the sun will rise every morning. is it illogical for me to say that there's eggs in my fridge? do you think i determined there were eggs in my fridge via deductive reasoning?

i keep mentioning phil 101 b/c your "it's illogical thing" is either coming from a) you being retarded/illiterate/delusional, or b) you thinking that hume's problem of induction suddenly means it's "illogical" to use induction. i'm taking the answer here to be (b). unfortunately, "illogical" does not mean what you think it means. watch this:

1. induction works.
2. i've seen ten million leopards with spots but never seen a leopard w/o spots.
3. therefore, i'm justified in believing the next leopard i see will have spots, by (1) and (2).

that *is* a valid argument. it's "logical". is it sound? actually, no, for one because i haven't even seen ten million leopards. but i did "use logic". if that were my whole reasoning process and i blurted out "the next leopard i see will have spots," i would not be speaking "illogically". do you understand?

i reiterate, the logical errors you want to convict other people of making are actually you not being rigorous enough with language, and not having studied logic/epistemology/language/etc enough. the reason for your error doesn't make you stupid, but parading the error around does.

[Trinsie]

Why I believe what I believe?

My dads favorite football team was the Eagles. We talked about the eagles and he told me of how great they were. I grew up watching the Eagles on the television and to this day they are my favorite team. I am now showing my son how awesome the Eagles are and we are watching them on Sundays. It is like clockwork. I don't live my day-by-day life on what the Eagles say or do, however every Sunday I gather with friends and family and give them a few hours of my time and honor them.

Does that answer the question?

[Meat]

I believe might makes right

[Max™]

An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field.
"How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all scottish sheep are black!"
To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!"
The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

[Shibo]

To attempt to answer the OP's question:

I think people's religious viewpoint does often correlate to their way of thinking in other portions of their lives, including politics (at least to a certain degree).

For example: I do not conform/subscribe/identify myself with any one particular religious belief system. It is only logical to continue one's analysis of religion throughout your life, as we know that information is dynamic. Since this is true, one can conclude that refusing to change one's attitude or viewpoint, regardless of any evidence put forward, is idiotic. I am not saying, however, that it is idiotic to resist change, as one must test new idea/theory/whatever it may be against what one currently understands.

Since I think in this fashion (which is essentially what I think most people would consider 'thinking logically'), I think this should be applied to other sects of life and society. I think politics is extremely resistant to change (inb4 change is bad, I am a realistic person and understand that not everything people attempt to change is going to make things better, thus why there is such a resistance to change).

On the other side of the spectrum, I know people who are very religious (Christian to be specific) who are extremely conservative in the way they live their life, politics included. People like this rely on outdated, static mentalities to base their decisions off of. To be specific, traditional values, familial values, religious values, etc. I am not saying all religious people are influenced in this way, as one of my best friends is a devout christian, but uses logical reasoning almost as much as I do (I say almost because I find conforming to a religious viewpoint to be illogical).

tl;dr: Most people are influenced by their religious viewpoints in regards to politics.

also, I didn't mention anything about morality in this as I don't think religion has any effect on what is actually acting morally.

[Zetanio]

@ zetanio or whoever, no, you didn't point out anything by substituting a word and then changing a not. yes, i am insulting you. your dumb paraphrase about a point too subtle for you to understand (but not very subtle) is insulting to me.

Oh lawdy! The smart man's subtle words runneth over ma head!

Why are you so mad?

I pointed out your silly little argument flaw.

Please explain this.

[pahnphoenix]

Oh lawdy! The smart man's subtle words runneth over ma head!

Why are you so mad?

I pointed out your silly little argument flaw.

Please explain this.

that my level of certainty that there is no god is the same as my level of certainty of many non-religious things shows that my level of certainty that there is no god does not render the belief religious. that christians' level of certainty of their religious beliefs is the same as mine regarding many non-religious things is totally irrelevant to this; the point is that level of certainty does not impart religious status, or least the level of certainty i have as an atheist that there is no god doesn't. i am not mad; just too mean to be nice to people than whom i am significantly more intelligent.