Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

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Immanuel Can
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Immanuel Can »

Skip wrote:
Atheism is an ideology.
There is the lie again.
So you say. But then you say...
It is a description of people who refuse to believe one particular claim.
and it's framed in at least one basic proposition.
Yep. "Take your woo someplace else."
If so, you've just admitted it's got a proposition, and is therefore a belief. That it's a denial does not make it not-a-belief: it's just a negative belief. Grammatically, it is a positive assertion of a negative fact. But you believe it, and indeed, have no basis for it but belief.

The better way to put the central proposition of Atheism is: "There are no gods." Absent belief in that simple claim, you're analytically an Agnostic or a Theist, but not an Atheist. Even Richard Dawkins, allegedly "the world's foremost" Atheist apologist knows and bluntly admits that. He will not declare himself an Atheist, because he knows very well Atheism is irrational. Now, you can continue to disagree, of course; because there's no rule that says you can't. But now your disagreement is with Dawkins and his ilk, not just me. Your camp is getting very small indeed, therefore.

The reason is that your view is clearly inconsistent with itself. If you had no ideology, you'd have no propositions in it. But you do, and you know you do, and as above, you even say you do. However, if you can't see it, you can't see it.

No hard feelings. It is what it is.
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

An instruction, such as "Get off on my foot", or "Close the door" or "Take your woo elsewhere"
does not constitute a belief, and certainly doesn't require a dogma made up for it by the clumsy oaf
who stood on another person's foot, the careless child who left the door open, and especially not
by the woomonger who failed to make a sale.
Nor does the non-buyer need the unsuccessful salesman to tell him
The better way to put the central proposition

when the central, and only, characteristic of atheism is not a proposition, but simply "No"
to all the gods and commandments proposed by the proponents of all the gods and commandments.
I guess - don't know, only guess - that the purveyors of gods and commandments and grounded irrational moral codes
need a system or systems of belief to organize the sheer volume of their contradictory propositions
and a dogma to insure conformity in the ranks of their converts;
perhaps, having fallen into such habits of thought over millennia, they find it difficult to imagine
that everyone who doesn't believe them can manage to think independently, without a canon.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Immanuel Can »

Skip wrote: I guess - don't know, only guess - that the purveyors of gods and commandments and grounded irrational moral codes
need a system or systems of belief to organize the sheer volume of their contradictory propositions
and a dogma to insure conformity in the ranks of their converts;
perhaps, having fallen into such habits of thought over millennia, they find it difficult to imagine
that everyone who doesn't believe them can manage to think independently, without a canon.
Such a marvelously simple idea. Atheist = good people who don't believe in things. Theists = foolish people who do. How neat.

Indeed, it has all the appeal of "...the clean and well-lit prison of one idea..." (Chesterton) from which the prisoner, being adequately supplied with stale bread and stagnant water, will by no means consent to be extricated. :wink:
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henry quirk
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"Atheism is an ideology"

Post by henry quirk »

It can be, or, at the least it can be the foundation for one, but -- obviously -- it doesn't have to be.

If I say 'try as I may I just ain't seein' evidence of a supranatural dimension or entity' this is not ideology but just a statement of observation. It's not a given that I, without god, will turn to the dark side, kill Jedi, and eat the galaxy.

If I say 'try as I may I just ain't seein' evidence of a supranatural dimension or entity' therefore there is no morality or ethic beyond what folks suss out therefore it is not only permissable but advisable to make folks behave as technocrats or a politburo suggests' this 'is' ideology (a philosophical foundation and practical measures extending out of that foundation).

Equally ideological is saying 'I see evidence of a supranatural dimension or entity, even if you don't, so I think it's permissable, advisable, to make folks behave as I think this dimension/entity dictates'.

So, both sides really need to stop with the generalized condemnations.

Some theists are shitholes, some atheists are shitholes, but not ALL theists and atheists are shitholes.

And what in holy hell does any of this falderol have to do with Bill O?

This thread shoulda died at one page. Instead, it's gets hijacked and turned into another 'god/no god' circus.

Aren't there several extant threads on all the permutations of that debate in place, in this place, already?

Lord, but you folks are a tiresome bunch... :|
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

Immanuel Can wrote: Such a marvelously simple idea. Atheist = good people who don't believe in things.
atheists: Good, bad, ugly, nice, mean, fat, sexy, dumb, clever, dexterous, funny, boring and all sorts of other people who don't believe one particular proposition: that a supernatural entity or entities is/are in charge of the world.
Theists = foolish people who do.
theists: an assortment of good, bad, ugly, kind, smart, foolish, cruel, generous and various other people who claim to believe in supernatural entities.
How messy! But that's the world I live in.
Evidently, yours is tidier and better-lit, and I can see the appeal.
I just haven't walked in and slammed the door and for some reason, this seems to gall you.
There's a pill for that, but it's as likely to have been invented by an atheist as a believer.
Walker
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Walker »

Skip wrote:There's a pill for that, but it's as likely to have been invented by an atheist as a believer.
Is that the pill that makes you larger, or smaller?
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

Walker wrote:
Skip wrote:There's a pill for that, but it's as likely to have been invented by an atheist as a believer.
Is that the pill that makes you larger, or smaller?
Whichever you prefer, if you have enough faith. But do be careful what you pray for.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Immanuel Can »

Skip wrote:... for some reason, this seems to gall you.
Heavens, no. :lol:
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

Immanuel Can wrote:
Skip wrote:... for some reason, this seems to gall you.
Heavens, no. :lol:
Preoccupy? Entertain?
In any case, you do spend an inordinate amount of keyboard-hours on inventing, producing and repeating
imaginary thought-scripts for imaginary atheists.
Walker
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Walker »

Skip wrote:
Walker wrote:
Skip wrote:There's a pill for that, but it's as likely to have been invented by an atheist as a believer.
Is that the pill that makes you larger, or smaller?
Whichever you prefer, if you have enough faith. But do be careful what you pray for.
I have no need for your pills or prescriptions.

Just giving you an opportunity to explain yourself.
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

Walker wrote:Just giving you an opportunity to explain yourself.
Very thoughtful, but I'll pass this time, thanks.
Walker
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Walker »

Skip wrote:
Walker wrote:Just giving you an opportunity to explain yourself.
Very thoughtful, but I'll pass this time, thanks.
Why change now.

And just to be clear, that's a rhetorical question, without the question mark.
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Greta
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Greta »

Immanuel Can wrote:
Greta wrote:...morality's inherent relativity...
In regard to secular morality, I think your statement is entirely warranted.

Dostoevsky thought so. Nietzsche thought so. And when two brilliant minds with such oppositional views somehow still turn out to agree, that's got to tell you something.
I am not promoting, Immanuel, just observing. Don't you sometimes speak about things you don't endorse simply as observation, without feeling the need to provide the obligatory PC statement of judgement to prove solidarity?
Immanuel Can wrote:
Stuff happens, the strong consume or use the weak.
Social Darwinism, then?
Again, I am not endorsing, just observing. It's been rather a pattern, and one that precedes biological life, ie. planets either absorb or banish all the minor planets, asteroids and other material around it as it cleared its orbit during its formation. C'est la vie.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Alan Watts once described himself as an intellectual vagabond, and that resonated with me. Still, as you know, I reject religions so whatever goals I set myself would not be their teachings.
Fine. But if you're getting no answers -- just "seeing through" everything...so that everything looks suspicious, inauthentic, unworthy and so forth...then what are you actually seeing? There's nothing left to look at, nothing to hope for, and no point.
Actually, I get answers every day. I see the gaining of knowledge as something that comes piecemeal. Each new knowledge brings me a little closer to reality. I don't have the big answers and I dispute anyone's claims to understand reality, including any that you may make with what I think of as "the black box of God". Maybe in some way, to some extent, aspects of the God idea are real. I'll wait and see. No rush :)
Immanuel Can wrote:I'm not saying be unskeptical or uncritical. I'm just saying that if criticism is being used well, it yields results in terms of definite answers. If it's being used undiscerningly, it just shaves the epistemological field flat.
"Shaves the epistemological field flat" - nice turn of phrase and concept, please forgive me if I borrow it sometime :)

I started with assumptions when I first retired. The last five years have been a process of doing exactly as you say, ditching my old ideas - flattening out bumps in my mental terrain and seeing what rises in their stead as I learn more.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Actually, women's equality has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Mao's China, where he wanted each individual to be the best possible tool of the state. Sometimes good can come from bad and vice versa.
Oh, for heaven's sake. Mao's China has killed more females than any other regime in the history of the world. Did you not know? The one-child policy has created rampant infanticide, almost exclusively against women. Go look in China. Count the heads. There should be slightly more women than men, on the world average...where did all the women go? :shock:
You can put away your cries of outrage and emoticons - superfluous. The one child policy happened after Mao. It was a brief period where China was starting to get things right and then, as you say, old biases resurfaced that reflected China's terribly sexist past, inherited from the foot binding imperialist Kuomintang patriarchs that preceded Mao. Of course, once Mao and Mme Mao went with self-deification they became equal opportunity killers.

Actually, I made a cartoon many years ago about foot binding https://goo.gl/photos/eJZXN27ABpycy1kr7

Again, I'm only observing that equality has occurred outside of the west, not holding China up as a model.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Then again, it wasn't so long ago that Muslim women were living like us in the west. Only in our lifetimes has misogyny in Islam been interpreted as lore, and law. Religions go through phases. Not so long ago in history Christianity wasn't much better than Islam is today. For a while each was improving but now Islam is backsliding. So it goes.
None of this is so, I'm afraid. Muslim women have been historically oppressed in the extreme. Christianity has never been anywhere near so bad as Islam...not hijab, no child "brides," no polygamy, no license for wife-beating (read "The Chapter of Women" in the Koran), no revenge rapes and homicides for disobedience...
To be not much better than "the worst of the worst" is still not ideal. Christianity's historical approach to women has been awful although, to be fair, most societies have treated women unfairly. That brings us back to the start of this post - that the strong consume the weak.
Immanuel Can wrote:But I do really wonder at the silence of the Feminist movement on Islam. I wonder if they really care about women after all...or just the rights of white, western ones.
There is no silence. Just that the complaints don't get reported and otherwise fall on deaf ears.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Still, "we are made of star stuff" will stay with me for life,
It's a pretty line, I admit. But what does it really say? Nothing. We don't twinkle. We're not heavenly. We're apparently not eternal, celestial or always bright either. He might have equally said "space junk": it's less poetic, but the essential implication is the same. He's saying we're debris derived from a random event in space.
Everything is the debris of the big bang, flying away from the white hole faster than the speed of light. How wonderful that over billions of years that debris would wind itself into so much interesting phenomena.

Sagan's line reminds us that stars and us are one, separated only by time. We are what some parts of a star (or stars) some billions of years ago eventually became. It tells me that life is not just biology, but the entire edifice of our reality is alive in some sense, and we are eloquent manifestations of this life.
Immanuel Can wrote:
We will hopefully be links in a chain to something "more" than we are today.
Well, as cosmos admits, "we" won't. Long before the ponderous gears of evolution would ever turn sufficiently to produce any change we would know about, we and billions of our ancestors will be dead.

"We" will never see any of that. That's not a great deal of hope or meaning, is it?
No problemo. Not everything meaningful needs to be in service to us humans - we are part of much larger stories. The dinos personally didn't benefit from their situation as links in the chain leading to us, yet all worked out well - for a while. Now we humans can be a link to whatever may follow us.

It's true that "we" are not going to escape an Earth that is doomed by its star to be obliterated in five billion years' time (with the surface sterilised in less than a billion years' time). Our personal deaths don't matter as we are all going to die long beforehand anyway.

Consider this in terms of eternal life. What is eternal life in context with a universe that in a quadrillion years consist of only black holes and bits of stray energy?
Immanuel Can wrote:Actually, Christianity is highly respectful of right-to-life, both at the beginning and at the end.
But not respectful of right-to-death, and the right to kill appears to be conditional in ways that are irrational, eg. the welfare unwanted and unfeeling blobs of protoplasm that lack even a formed nervous system being of more interest than those of grown people.
"Right to death?" Well, here's a question: to where are you sending people when you "mercy-kill" them? Is it really "mercy"? How would we know?[/quote]
If you are dying and in terrible, horrible agony, struggling to breathe, always nauseous, everything hurts, and you are incapacitated with no hope, and it reaches the point where you plead to be allowed to die, would you want your wishes to be respected? I would.
Immanuel Can wrote:Even supposing that the Sagan account of things were true (let us accept that for the minute, without question) would it ever really be an act of "mercy" to remove a person from the only life they will ever have, and send them into eternal black darkness? Is even a difficult and painful life better than the eternal black hole? I would be tempted to consider the possibility that it might: and that "mercy" might be better spent on alleviating the pain, not on killing the patient. I'm not sure how we can ever be "respectful" of life by simply ending it forever.
Hehehe you are trying to work me out and thinking that maybe Sagan can work as a reference. I neither believe in anyone's idea of an afterlife or lack and nor do I t subscribe to CS or NDGT's ideas as you subscribe to JC's. I sometimes disagree with their suppositions. Do you disagree with any of JC's suppositions?
Immanuel Can wrote:As for infanticide, I suppose we'll just have to disagree that that is ever warranted. But we'll leave that there.
Blobs of protoplasm are not infants - in the first trimester even many fish species are vastly more aware and feeling than foetuses. Certainly, once you have an actual human baby (or any baby), then killing them would seem just a teensy bit inappropriate.
Skip
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Skip »

Immanuel Can wrote:
As for infanticide, I suppose we'll just have to disagree that that is ever warranted.
Christian nations, like the USA, that even after a century of debate can't get its head around family planning on a tiny scale,
don't need a warrant for killing infants and everybody and everything else on a massive scale.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hanfo ... -1.4107595
The founding of the Hanford site dates back to 1943. It was created by the U.S. government to produce huge amounts of plutonium, which is used in the creation of nuclear weapons.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Bill O'Reilly"s downfall

Post by Immanuel Can »

Skip wrote:Christian nations...
There's no such thing, just like there's no such thing as Hindu polar bears or Atheist butterflies.
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