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Archives => Katacombs => Topic started by: purple on 16 Apr 2015, 15:25
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I'm going to share a video in which some ladies, whom are all smarter than me, discuss a topic that's very important to me. Censorship.
The 'warm up' banter is a little vulgar and NSFW, and this episode of their show meanders on a few tangents but they really get to the meat of some very important social issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy8zlfxmus
Also Karen Straughan:
(http://cdn.meme.li/instances/250x250/54281369.jpg)
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I suspect discussion about these anti feminist ladies will quickly descend into catacomb territory, no thanks, but I did check the link for a few min and read up on them a bit.
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As I said to Bloodbird...if you believe this stuff, why would you share it? It's only going to lead to your, well, disadvantage.
I'm against censorship, of course, but I'm also against anyone discriminating against me.
So, good luck to you, but I'm out.
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Please don't bring this kind of stuff here.
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Not again.
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As I said to Bloodbird...if you believe this stuff, why would you share it? It's only going to lead to your, well, disadvantage.
48 Laws?
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As I said to Bloodbird...if you believe this stuff, why would you share it? It's only going to lead to your, well, disadvantage.
48 Laws?
I'm saying that, if I want to get out a message about censorship, I'd prefer to be posting videos of Christopher Hitchens.
As for gender issues, I've found that I'm a far happier person if I just don't bother with them, at least in terms of gender issues in the first world. I can afford to - I won't marry, I don't intend to have kids, and my business is in a field which women rarely enter. I don't know who is right on what, and I don't care.
I think that enjoying my own life is a lot more rewarding than worrying about the pay gap or alimony or whatever.
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(http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/612/974/1de.php)
Ok seriously out of this looming shit show.
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I came for the shit show.
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I'm saying that, if I want to get out a message about censorship, I'd prefer to be posting videos of Christopher Hitchens.
Because Christopher Hitchens is so much more neutral? He's , honestly, a demagouge using lots of polemics. I don't think he's the better choice by any stretch - it's just that you apparently happen to agree with him.
So, you seem to be guilty of just what you accuse purple to be guilty of.
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Despite Hitchen's idiotic viewpoints, he does have one redeeming factor: he was a talented writer. He had a very respectable writing and journalism career before the silly antitheism wave. If you go back and read his essays on topics not related to politics or religion, he was very talented.
Sadly, that talent went to waste when he became very famous.
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So, he was a talented wirter, using that for his activities as polemicist and demagouge. Using rhethorical talent for that doesn't make it any better nor is it a redeeming factor in my book: In fact, it rather makes it worse.
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So, he was a talented wirter, using that for his activities as polemicist and demagouge. Using rhethorical talent for that doesn't make it any better nor is it a redeeming factor in my book: In fact, it rather makes it worse.
I don't disagree. I meant his career has redeeming qualities when taken as a whole. Anyone interested in being an essayist would do well to read him. I am not saying it redeems his later work.
Edit: To sum it up in a pithy manner, what he was famous for was not his career -- it was the end of it.
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I don't disagree. I meant his career has redeeming qualities when taken as a whole. Anyone interested in being an essayist would do well to read him. I am not saying it redeems his later work.
Oh, yes, with that I can kind of agree. Still, with his anti-thesim he's certainly not a greater advocate of freedom of speech than anti-feminists.
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Still, with his anti-thesim he's certainly not a greater advocate of freedom of speech than anti-feminists.
Agreed.
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Oh, yes, with that I can kind of agree. Still, with his anti-thesim he's certainly not a greater advocate of freedom of speech than anti-feminists.
He turns the weapon of rhetoric onto those who have used it to forbid freedom of speech to those who disagreed with them for millenia. I'm really not seeing Hitchens as the problem in this equation but you, of course, are entirely free to differ.
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Oh, yes, with that I can kind of agree. Still, with his anti-thesim he's certainly not a greater advocate of freedom of speech than anti-feminists.
He turns the weapon of rhetoric onto those who have used it to forbid freedom of speech to those who disagreed with them for millenia. I'm really not seeing Hitchens as the problem in this equation but you, of course, are entirely free to differ.
Well, he's not much of a problem anymore considering he has passed away. And he was the only effective rhetorician out of those four.
The issue (from my perspective, I can't speak for Mithra) is that too often blatant hate speech is cheered as championing freedom of speech. One can do the latter without the former.
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Oh, yes, with that I can kind of agree. Still, with his anti-thesim he's certainly not a greater advocate of freedom of speech than anti-feminists.
He turns the weapon of rhetoric onto those who have used it to forbid freedom of speech to those who disagreed with them for millenia. I'm really not seeing Hitchens as the problem in this equation but you, of course, are entirely free to differ.
Well, he's not much of a problem anymore considering he has passed away. And he was the only effective rhetorician out of those four.
The issue (from my perspective, I can't speak for Mithra) is that too often blatant hate speech is cheered as championing freedom of speech. One can do the latter without the former.
I agree a lot! (Especially on the Hitchens not being, personally, a problem anymore, since he passed away. There's his legacy, though, which is, in part, problematic, though, I'd claim.) I'll just paste in the response I was about to type when Sarice answered:
First, it is a far stretch to claim that all religious people used rhetoric to forbid freedom of speech. It's already a far stretch to say that all Christians did so. It's also quite contentious, at best, to claim that they did so, because they were religious. And furthermore, I'm doubting that rhetorics is a tool that really is able to forbid freedom of speech.
That said, he is quite happy to use it exactly the way he polemicises against, if it is used against religious people: Because he was of the firm belief that they are wrong. He was dedicated to oppress religious people as much as he percieved religious people to have oppressed 'non-religious people'.
In the end, though: Where is the more of impact of anti-feminism in regard to free speech in comparison to Hitchens virulent and dogmatic anti-theism? It's not really that I said he is a problem per se: I've been saying that if anti-feminism is a problem when speaking out for freedom of speech, then anti-theism is arguably as well.
Or to use Hitchens' words: "Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate." If that goes for Hitchens, then for anti-feminists and misogynists as well. ( But yes, to me this is a shabby excuse to try to justify hate speech. So, yes, I see Hitchens as a problem in the equasion. - I don't think that matters much, though, to the argument that Hitchens isn't a better spokesperson for freedom of speech than anti-feminists.)
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Well, I was going to stay away from this if it were about gender. But, since it appears to be about something I do care a great deal about, I will comment.
First, I recommended Hitchens because I remembered that he had defended the right to speak, on several occasions, including the one regarding the Denmark cartoons of Mohammad. I also recommended him because he defended the right of those who disagreed with him to say what they wished as well. And it strikes me that Hitchens was, if not perfectly palatable to some, at least much more skilled in defending free speech than Karen Straughn, who, while interesting to listen to, I do not find especially convincing.
That said, I'll also stand up for the rest of what you criticize. For most of my life, I was a devout Evangelical Christian. In 2011, doing some study of the Gospels, and using my Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, I started noticing some contradictions and problems. This led me into an intense period of study and research, which led to my loss of faith.
I'm an atheist, and an anti-theist. Looking back, I see so many ways that religion blighted my life. While my decision was made on the basis of evidence, I also have to say that I am much happier, much more educated, and possess much more...well, peace. But the biggest benefit for me is that I now know the truth, and also that I'm not afraid of learning more truths.
So do I want to get rid of all religion? Yes. I believe religion to be a false comfort, a delusion, and a closing of the mind. I think that it creates tribalism, and I think that the teachings of religion enforce illogical and harmful strictures upon humans, which often lead to harm and death, such as the Catholic Church's prohibition of abortion and condoms, or Evangelicals attempting to teach Creationism, or the idea that beating your wife is sanctioned by the prophet Mohammad. And I've read these holy books, memorized portions of them, in fact, and I do know exactly what I'm talking about.
But anti-theism doesn't agree with banning religious speech. What I want, as an anti-theist, is the right for everyone to put their arguments out there, and for those arguments to be examined with an even-handed thought process evaluating each argument on the basis of reason and evidence. Because when that happens, atheism, tends to win. A lot. Which is one reason why unbelievers are the fastest growing religious demographic in the U.S.
That doesn't mean that I hate believers. Rather, I see them, and my former self, as victims of a mind-virus. And I do my best to, in a caring and kind way, ask them to examine their own beliefs. To date, I have aided in the deconversion of at least two of my friends from Christianity, and I hope to help far more escape the clutches of religion.
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I don't have much of an interest in the debate as a whole, I've had it too many times. But religion is on the rise world-wide. That is something people rarely mention. They tend to just repeat the increase of non-religious in US and Western Europe. And it is always important to actually look at what surveys ask. There is indeed a rise in the West of not identifying with a specific religion -- but that is often overstated into a rise of atheism. Those are two different concepts.
Regardless, non-belief is indeed falling when you take the world as a whole. And there is recent evidence that the increasing trend of unbelief is starting to reverse in some Western countries.
Edit: I suppose the other thing I will mention is that people tend to assume a very West-centric view of religion. They assume that the Enlightenment is a process that is inevitable, etc. It is arguable that the influence of Enlightenment-style rationalism is waning, not becoming stronger. Even if the established religions were to deteriorate, there is no reason to assume that they will be replaced by old school rationalism like many prominent atheists seem to believe.
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I would welcome your debate Vikarion, not here because it isn't the place for it.
I've dealt with plenty of atheists and anti-theists attempting to reason away my faith and my "religion," but none of them have succeeded because, in the end, I too believe I hold the truth and it has been found through honest search and evidence.
I agree whole-heartedly that organized religion has done a great many evils in this world and likely will still, and I agree that many individuals claiming to adhere to this-or-that religion have committed great evils and done many wrongs.
However, I've seen just as many wrongs and just as many evils committed my atheists, anti-theists, agnostics and other philosophies/religions/cults/whatever to know that it's not a condition of religion, it's a condition of the human heart.
Religion just takes the spotlight because its followers are supposed to be different and all too often, we aren't.
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I don't have much of an interest in the debate as a whole, I've had it too many times. But religion is on the rise world-wide. That is something people rarely mention. They tend to just repeat the increase of non-religious in US and Western Europe. And it is always important to actually look at what surveys ask. There is indeed a rise in the West of not identifying with a specific religion -- but that is often overstated into a rise of atheism. Those are two different concepts.
Regardless, non-belief is indeed falling when you take the world as a whole. And there is recent evidence that the increasing trend of unbelief is starting to reverse in some Western countries.
Edit: I suppose the other thing I will mention is that people tend to assume a very West-centric view of religion. They assume that the Enlightenment is a process that is inevitable, etc. It is arguable that the influence of Enlightenment-style rationalism is waning, not becoming stronger. Even if the established religions were to deteriorate, there is no reason to assume that they will be replaced by old school rationalism like many prominent atheists seem to believe.
It would be more accurate to say that Islam is growing, and that is largely because they are having more kids than the rest of us. :P That's ok, I'll simply brush up on my Koran studies, as indeed I am already doing.
But in societies with well-informed populations, the tilt is definitely away from religion - at least according to the studies I've seen.
As for worldviews, I hold only that an adherence to skepticism, rationality, and science will be necessary for the survival of our species. In my view, a Christian who is skeptical, otherwise rational, and accepting of science is better than an atheist who is not. But I'd rather have a person be more rational, and thus, an atheist as well as the others.
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That last bit was what I was referring to in my edit. Even for those that are moving away from religion, there is little evidence that they are moving towards an old-fashioned rationalism as per Enlightenment. On the contrary, it seems that many so-called 'postmodernist' approaches are on the rise with the unbelieving. Not rationalism.
And Christianity is growing quickly worldwide. It is not just Islam. Christianity is spreading unbelievably fast in significant parts of Africa.
But again, I have no interest in the debate as such. It seems like a fairly pointless one, to me. The amount of people I have met that have changed their minds about these topics because of a debate they had with someone is less than I could count on one hand.
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I've dealt with plenty of atheists and anti-theists attempting to reason away my faith and my "religion," but none of them have succeeded because, in the end, I too believe I hold the truth and it has been found through honest search and evidence.
Yes, you do, and I did when I was a Christian. Please don't be offended, because I only use this as an analogy, but I feel that "mind-virus" is a very apt way to describe what religions do. In a sense, they are like the AIDS virus, because they form a system in which the very methods we use for checking the truth of our beliefs are co-opted. For example, we do not use the same standards for evaluating our own religious beliefs that we do in evaluating other, similar claims.
I agree whole-heartedly that organized religion has done a great many evils in this world and likely will still, and I agree that many individuals claiming to adhere to this-or-that religion have committed great evils and done many wrongs.
However, I've seen just as many wrongs and just as many evils committed my atheists, anti-theists, agnostics and other philosophies/religions/cults/whatever to know that it's not a condition of religion, it's a condition of the human heart.
Religion just takes the spotlight because its followers are supposed to be different and all too often, we aren't.
This is what I like to call the "you are too!" argument. To me, it's rather irrelevant what crimes were committed, although it's hard to find crimes that were committed in the name of atheism, as opposed to Marxism. But I hate Marxism too. :P Nonetheless, it really doesn't matter to me what crimes were committed by believers, in terms of my own belief. If Christianity were true, it would be true, whether Christians were responsible for the Crusades or not.
I left Christianity because I did Biblical research, and found the Bible to be a very flawed and unreliable document. Books of the New Testament were forged, the Gospels contradict each other and were written decades after the event by non-eyewitnesses who altered the stories in each account, the stories of the Old Testament, especially the early ones, are proven almost entirely false by archaeology, and the Creation account of Genesis, as well as the Flood, are entirely mythical, as shown by virtually any work in any of the biological, astronomical, or geological sciences. To start with.
That's why I left Christianity. I'm not offering a debate, this is my perspective.
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And Christianity is growing quickly worldwide. It is not just Islam. Christianity is spreading unbelievably fast in significant parts of Africa.
Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that. I shouldn't have, given that they've taken up the practice of killing witches and gays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/18/african-children-denounce_n_324943.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/18/african-children-denounce_n_324943.html)
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Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that. I shouldn't have, given that they've taken up the practice of killing witches and gays.
As I said, I have no interest in a debate. But you should always account for people that convert from atheism to a religion in your perspective. The way you describe it above is as if people are infected because they are unaware of a cure -- that sounds rather insulting to people that do an incredible amount of research and convert as a result of that research.
I was an atheist for about ten years, five or so of which I considered myself an antitheist. I ended up converting to a religion after that time. But either way, I do not mind discussing things as long as they do not turn into debates. Debates about these things are rarely fruitful; we've all heard the other side's points thousands of times. But if you ever feel like a casual discussion about stuff, you can send me a message.
But in order to avoid starting a debate here, I will bow out of the topic.
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I was an atheist for about ten years, five or so of which I considered myself an antitheist. I ended up converting to a religion after that time.
Well, I would never claim that an atheist can't convert. I would just like to know what sort of empirical evidence you could give for that belief.
And, btw, calling me out for saying that I think that religion is a "mind-virus" is a little...interesting...considering that you don't seem to have had any problem with calling my anti-theism "idiotic".
So while I don't go out of my way to offend, and, indeed, I pointed out that this was my view, I don't think that you're being entirely fair.
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Had to come back to post this. Those honeybadger clowns were just tossed out on their asses after trying to pull some disruptive "anti censorship" (men's rights) stunts at a convention. Love it. http://kotaku.com/gamergate-booth-kicked-out-of-canadian-comic-expo-1698538297
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I was an atheist for about ten years, five or so of which I considered myself an antitheist. I ended up converting to a religion after that time.
Well, I would never claim that an atheist can't convert. I would just like to know what sort of empirical evidence you could give for that belief.
And, btw, calling me out for saying that I think that religion is a "mind-virus" is a little...interesting...considering that you don't seem to have had any problem with calling my anti-theism "idiotic".
So while I don't go out of my way to offend, and, indeed, I pointed out that this was my view, I don't think that you're being entirely fair.
I did no such thing. I referred to Hitchen's antitheism as idiotic.
And he did often get quite idiotic. I do not extend that to all antitheists.
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I was an atheist for about ten years, five or so of which I considered myself an antitheist. I ended up converting to a religion after that time.
Well, I would never claim that an atheist can't convert. I would just like to know what sort of empirical evidence you could give for that belief.
And, btw, calling me out for saying that I think that religion is a "mind-virus" is a little...interesting...considering that you don't seem to have had any problem with calling my anti-theism "idiotic".
So while I don't go out of my way to offend, and, indeed, I pointed out that this was my view, I don't think that you're being entirely fair.
I did no such thing. I referred to Hitchen's antitheism as idiotic.
And he did often get quite idiotic. I do not extend that to all antitheists.
I draw mine, from his. And, as he coined the term, how could I do otherwise? You called me an idiot, now you want to squirm out of it. Own up to it. You believe, and you think that I am a fool, and condemned to hell therefore. That doesn't offend me, as long as you are honest enough to admit it.
It does offend me that you are cowardly enough to try to avoid the implication.
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Congratulations on trying to make this personal and demonstrating why I was trying to bow out of the thread.
Edit: Also, according to Wikipedia, the term 'antitheist' as it is currently used was coined in the 1800s. So it is certainly not a Hitchens term.
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Congratulations on trying to make this personal and demonstrating why I was trying to bow out of the thread.
Edit: Also, according to Wikipedia, the term 'antitheist' as it is currently used was coined in the 1800s. So it is certainly not a Hitchens term.
You mistake me. Or, perhaps, I'm too comfortable with these terms.
I live within a community of fundamentalists. To me, it doesn't bother me to be called an "idiot", or "damned".
Nonetheless, what I was trying to say is that Hitchen's anti-theism is as moderate, or more moderate, than my own. As such, you've already stated your opinion of me. :P I don't care, though. What I want to know is WHY you think I'm wrong. And, if you can't give reason for why I'm wrong, well, given what you've called me and mine, I hardly think I'm out of placed to call you "infected" by a bad idea.
That said, understand, I take none of this personally. This is the internet...you can call me a fool, and it doesn't hurt me. Just don't try to edit your previous posts. I'd rather be insulted than lose what you actually said.
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Well, I am not going to keep on repeating forever that I did not call you an idiot. It is obvious I did not. Rather than ask what it was about Hitchens I thought was idiotic you would rather take the insult in order to try to have some sort of leverage. Sorry, not going to happen because I didn't call you an idiot.
Last post in this thread for me (for real, this time). Cheerio.
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Read a thing a while back, said that Christians are a lot more accepting of atheism, than Islam, because of a major difference in how the beliefs work.
Jesus said "believe in me". Christians believe. which makes atheists just people who are yet to be convinced.
Muslims don't believe though, they know. And that makes atheists deniers of 'facts'.
Saw a different thing, had quotes from Islamic scholars about questions about Islam, and there was a pair of them that stood out.
"How do we know the Koran is the word of Allah ? Because Muhammed is the messenger of Allah."
when paired with:
"How do we know Muhammed is the messenger of Allah ? Because the Koran says so."
looks a bit circular.
Even for those that are moving away from religion, there is little evidence that they are moving towards an old-fashioned rationalism as per Enlightenment. On the contrary, it seems that many so-called 'postmodernist' approaches are on the rise with the unbelieving.
Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Majestic 12. Rothschilds. I want to believe. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. JFK shot MLK. Autism causes vaccines.
They don't even teach schoolchildren to check sources, and to realise that all journalism has bias, that they way they report on what happened, or don't report, is to create a particular world view.
"Man arrested for murder", "Man arrested for vicious murder", "Evil killer that shocked nation". All of those headlines are intended to create a particular world view. Even the first one.
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I've never been so relieved to see a thread derailed into an arguement about atheism in my life.
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I know, right ?
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Well, I am not going to keep on repeating forever that I did not call you an idiot. It is obvious I did not. Rather than ask what it was about Hitchens I thought was idiotic you would rather take the insult in order to try to have some sort of leverage. Sorry, not going to happen because I didn't call you an idiot.
Last post in this thread for me (for real, this time). Cheerio.
Meh. This is probably why I shouldn't post while tired. I don't think I communicate very effectively.
But let me put it this way...from my perspective, it feels like this:
You: "Hitchen's idiotic viewpoints"
Me: "Uh, I hold those same views, in regards to religion, and I don't think they're idiotic"
You: "I'm not calling you an idiot"
Me: "Well, if my views are idiotic, it kinda follows.
Now, that might not be fair. And, in retrospect, "cowardly" is not a word I should have used, and I apologize.
Yet - and I hate following an apology with "yet" - it does seem a bit like a conversational hit-and-run.
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I've never been so relieved to see a thread derailed into an arguement about atheism in my life.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
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Saw a different thing, had quotes from Islamic scholars about questions about Islam, and there was a pair of them that stood out.
"How do we know the Koran is the word of Allah ? Because Muhammed is the messenger of Allah."
when paired with:
"How do we know Muhammed is the messenger of Allah ? Because the Koran says so."
looks a bit circular.
I agree, however, there is indeed a small, but possibly growing, movement for Islamic apologetics, much as in the Christian church. On the other hand, they tend to be even less convincing to me than the Christian ones.
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First, vikarion, we can't know that you're in the line of apostolic succession of Hitchen's anti-theism (which is not only anti-theism but a much broader anti-religionism).
If you feel like you're called out as idiot, because Hitchens' is called idiotic in his anti-theism, then it's because you choose to identify with that starin of anti-theism, not because someone called you, personally, an idiot: There was no intention at all to call you an idiotic.
The anti-theism of Hitchens is, by the way, everything but moderate. It is based on a metaphysical materialism which isn't either based on 'empirical evidence' (and it can't be grounded in that in principle, because 'empirical evidence' (that is scientific evidence) is grounded in a commitment to methodological materialism: and thus trying to base it in such is begging the question, really) nor has it a foundation in common sense (because there are common-sense positions which are either at odds with materialsim or that materialism has at least a very hard time to account for).
Suffice to say, modern metaphysical (reductive/eliminative) materialism is actually a position that needs a lot of very sophisticated argument to make it a proper contender with other positions in metaphysics.
There is nothing obvious about the claim that one would need 'empirical evidence' for any kind of belief. Actually, it's misunderstanding of what religious belief is. It is also a misunderstanding that we need 'empirical evidence' to be justified in treating something as knowledge. The fact that, by definition, 'empirical evidence' is needed to hold a scientific theory (in natural science) to be justified, doesn't really at all, not even a tiny bit, imply that we need 'empirical evidence' to view all kinds of beliefs as justified enough to consider them reliable.
So, that's the first point in which Hitchens' anti-theism can be considered idiotic: It is self-defeating. to justify it you need to take recourse to non-scientific explanations, and reasons that are not 'empirical evidence' - but then the view disqualifies all non-scientific, non-empirical evidence and reasons. That doesn't work out, obviously.
As this is the case, those poeple that hold those positions are fundamentalists. They adhere strictly to that set of ideas and principles and they usually don't allow for any of those fundamental principles to be questioned.
The second point where Hitchens becomes idiotic in his anti-theism is where he mistakes freedom of speech as a license for hate-speech. It is not. Simple as that. Take a look at the laws or the declaration of human rights: Freedom of speech is limited by other right amongst which is the right to not be ridiculed and defamed. Hitchen's call for heaping ridicule and hate on religious people - and he did call out for that - is quite a-moderate and frankly, idiotic.
And the third point, and the last I will raise, while I'm sure there are others as well, where he describes religion and - more broadly - religious thought as a 'virus of the mind'. First, this is based on the 'meme' view of ideas, which is according to modern neuroscience not fitting to how brain-processes occur physically - at all. It is also at odds with psychological accounts of thought and also with epistemology. To make it short: There is so little empirical evidence for it, that one really should go for more fitting theories - especially if one places such emphasis on scientific evidence. It is, frankly again, idiotic to hold on to it under the given circumstances.
It is clear to me, that these three points are objectively idiotic views, in the sense that they are incongruous and inviting ridicule. They are inconsistent, and not in keeping with what is correct (something that is self-defeating can't be correct), proper (a position that depends on human rights, yet cherry-picks them is not proper), or logical (a self-defeating position isn't logical).
Your personal anecdotes are, by the way, no empirical evidence at all in that regard. They are stricly speaking un-scientific, because they are personal and subjective. Accepting the importance of them puts you, basically, in a paradoxical position when holding onto a worldview that denies the importance of personal and subjective experiences, if it is giving reason to religious belief.
All that, by the way, still doesn't mean that you are an idiot or that you are - in an unqualified sense - idiotic. It just means that you hold positions that are idiotic and engage in some idiotic behaviours.
So, unless you identify with the 'idiotic viewpoints' of Hitchens to the degree that you think that they make up the essence of who you are, you have little reason - if any reason at all - to feel that someone called you an idiot, here. Equally, unless you think that those idiotic points are at the core of your anti-theism, you have no need to think that your anti-theism has been called out as idiotic.
T bring this full circle: It doesn't matter whether Hitchens' attempt to get hate-speech justified by over-extending the right to freedom of speech is more 'convincing' than that of the anti-feminists: He is not the better spokesperson for freedom of speech because of that. And certainly the anti-feminists are not worse spokespersons for it, because of their anti-feminism, as Hitchens was similarly intolerant, even though his intolerance was directed at another group of people.
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Oh, and I would make a point about censorship (sorry Lyn :P ): Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend.
You don't need freedom of speech if you don't want to offend. No one is going to get in trouble for saying that Allah is awesome in Saudi Arabia, or that the Catholic church is wonderful in the Philippines, or that the Communist party in China is terrific. No, you get in trouble when you decide to offend people by disagreeing - most often, the people in charge.
What hate speech laws do is create a class of thoughts that it is illegal to speak. And then hand the power of enforcing such laws over to the very institutions and people who have a great interest in destroying the ability of others to oppose them. Make it illegal to call gays "sinners", and you eventually have a way to toss any Christian you like into jail. Make it illegal to call Islam bullshit, and you've essentially outlawed atheism.
And I think the idea of outlawing thoughts should be troubling. In creating rules for what people may think out loud, you're establishing a precedent for denying everyone in your society access to ideas. Sure, today it may be homophobic remarks, but let the demographics change a bit, and tomorrow it may be the teaching of evolution that is outlawed.
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If you think that you can't disagree or voice disagreement in a non-offensive, non-hateful way, that you need to go against the right of all humans to live in dignity - on which all human rights are based - and which demands that humans are to be treated with respect and are to be kept safe from attacks upon their honour and reputation, then, well...
you have no basis for the right to freedom of speech either.
The right to freedom of speech needs to be limited, necessarily.
That said, not all 'hate speech laws' are really aiming to outlaw hate speech: Some modern ones do, though. Anyhow, the failure to legislate properly against it doesn't make hate speech any more acceptable.
So, no: Freedom of speech is not the freedom to offend, and certainly not the freedom to speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which may incite violence or prejudicial action or which disparages or intimidates a human being or an association of humans, which is formed through and in the excercise of their basic and fundamental human rights.
The freedom to disagree is an entirely different animal than the freedom to offend or to hate speech.
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Mithra,
One.
Laying aside the fact that I think you are confusing methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism...no, actually I won't lay that aside.
Metaphysical naturalism is a claim that nature is all there is. Methodological naturalism is the assumption that we should look for natural causes for effects. I never heard or read Hitchens saying that there couldn't be a God, but rather that the evidence for such was woefully lacking.
Should we want evidence? Well, if you don't think there is any value in evidence and reason, I obviously cannot offer any evidence or reason to convince you otherwise. All I can say is that evidence and reason seem to be really good at giving us models of the world that work. I mean, airplanes that fly, satellites, cell phones...if there are other ways of constructing accurate truths about the world, it seems odd that they can't be demonstrated. And it also seems to be a bit off that all the other methods of understanding the world people use produce contradictory models, sometimes even self-contradictory.
So I don't need to take refuge in anything. I simply look around, and pragmatically determine what happens to actually produce results. And, frankly, this is how most of us live in everyday life. If I see a car coming, I don't think "gee, maybe observational evidence isn't a good path to knowledge". I get out of the way. So what I suggest that people do is apply the very same standards for beliefs such as "there's a car coming" to other beliefs, such as "there was a world-wide flood".
Two.
Sadly, the fact that the U.N. comes up with a declaration of human rights does not mean I have to agree with it. To say that one cannot attack the ideas of others isn't about human rights, anyway. It's about giving ideas rights, about setting up some models of the world as sacred. It's different in severity, but no different in principle, from the motivation behind burning heretics at the stake.
And as I said earlier, giving government - the institution with the greatest motivation to control ideas - the power to do so should be pretty worrisome. It should also be worrying that someone else thinks that they have the right to tell you what you can think out loud.
Three.
Actually, you're beginning to make me wonder if you have more than a passing acquaintance with what Hitchens wrote or spoke. I didn't claim that Hitchens said that religion was a literal mind-virus, I said that I thought it was an apt analogy. Now, I don't think I need to point this out, but I will: an analogy is not a perfect representation of the working of the original subject. And if you'd done reading on the subject, you'd discover that the term "meme" was invented by Richard Dawkins, not by Hitchens.
So, to say that it's unscientific to call religions "mind-viruses", is rather to miss the point. It's not that I think that religious ideas operate like a virus on a mechanical level. What I mean is that bad ideas "infect" people and lead to them doing things harmful to themselves and others - like a cell that has been infected by a virus.
Fourth.
I didn't claim that my personal experience is evidence. I claim that it was my search for evidence that led to my experience. How you create a claim that I didn't make, I don't know. I am certainly not going to say "I experienced atheism, and you should become an atheist because of that". I'm saying "this is how I lost my faith".
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[mod]So this thread is starting to go downhill. My suggestion is that you either salvage it or abandon it. Its fate is in your hands.[/mod]
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Yes, you do, and I did when I was a Christian. Please don't be offended, because I only use this as an analogy, but I feel that "mind-virus" is a very apt way to describe what religions do. In a sense, they are like the AIDS virus, because they form a system in which the very methods we use for checking the truth of our beliefs are co-opted. For example, we do not use the same standards for evaluating our own religious beliefs that we do in evaluating other, similar claims.
Just grabbing this bit here Vik, because a really super easy way to prove this point is to demonstrate to the person that they already are an atheist. They already don't believe in every other god save for their own. Its their own specific religion that they are blinded to the faults of.
Nico, I will never fathom how you avoid drifting into endless solipsism with the kind of thinking you're demonstrating here. I'll attempt to respond to it and explain why you don't actually create an infinite deductive recursive loop when trying to explain why reductionism and materialism are useful.
But before I get into that, I just wanted to respond to this specifically:
The freedom to disagree is an entirely different animal than the freedom to offend or to hate speech.
Offence is taken, not given. A word is only offensive if I think it has an offensive meaning. The word faggot has offensive connotations because of its associations with homophobia, but the word itself is just an arrangement of letters, one that in another language might mean something completely different. There is a Fucking, Austria.
To say it another way, in order to intentionally offend someone, I need to know what they will find offensive. If I were to just shout Pasta! At someone on the street, they would likely give me a bewildered look but not be particularly offended by it at all. In a world where I knew the word pasta had come to be used as a slur for a particular group of which this person I see belongs, I can expect an entirely different outcome.
So when you say 'you should not have the freedom to offend someone' its actually a very dangerous thing to say, because again, offence is taken, not given. The other person decides what is offensive, not you. I know plenty of Christians who feel offended by the existence of gays, I'm sure there's people who would find equal rights for women to be an offensive concept. As soon as you put that power into someone else's hands, you give away your freedom for the benefit of their desire to never be uncomfortable.
Now, on to your proposition that you don't need evidence for beliefs to be reliable.
Why do I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow?
Because I've seen the Sun rise on thousands of previous days.
Ah... but why do I believe the future will be like the past?
Even if I go past the mere surface observation of the Sun rising, to the apparently universal and exceptionless laws of gravitation and nuclear physics, then I am still left with the question: "Why do I believe this will also be true tomorrow?"
I could appeal to Occam's Razor, the principle of using the simplest theory that fits the facts... but why believe in Occam's Razor? Because it's been successful on past problems? But who says that this means Occam's Razor will work tomorrow?
And lo, the one said:
Science also depends on unjustified assumptions. Thus science is ultimately based on faith, so don't you criticize me for believing in [silly-belief-#238721].
As I've previously observed:
It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of "Science is based on faith too, so there!" Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say "Science is based on faith too!" in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment?
Arguing that you should be immune to criticism is rarely a good sign.
But this doesn't answer the legitimate philosophical dilemma: If every belief must be justified, and those justifications in turn must be justified, then how is the infinite recursion terminated?
And if you're allowed to end in something assumed-without-justification, then why aren't you allowed to assume anything without justification?
Suppose you're drawing red and white balls from an urn. You observe that, of the first 9 balls, 3 are red and 6 are white. What is the probability that the next ball drawn will be red?
That depends on your prior beliefs about the urn. If you think the urn-maker generated a uniform random number between 0 and 1, and used that number as the fixed probability of each ball being red, then the answer is 4/11 (by Laplace's Law of Succession). If you think the urn originally contained 10 red balls and 10 white balls, then the answer is 7/11.
Which goes to say that, with the right prior—or rather the wrong prior—the chance of the Sun rising tomorrow, would seem to go down with each succeeding day... if you were absolutely certain, a priori, that there was a great barrel out there from which, on each day, there was drawn a little slip of paper that determined whether the Sun rose or not; and that the barrel contained only a limited number of slips saying "Yes", and the slips were drawn without replacement.
There are possible minds in mind design space who have anti-Occamian and anti-Laplacian priors; they believe that simpler theories are less likely to be correct, and that the more often something happens, the less likely it is to happen again.
And when you ask these strange beings why they keep using priors that never seem to work in real life... they reply, "Because it's never worked for us before!"
Now, one lesson you might derive from this, is "Don't be born with a stupid prior." This is an amazingly helpful principle on many real-world problems, but I doubt it will satisfy philosophers.
Here's how I treat this problem myself: I try to approach questions like "Should I trust my brain?" or "Should I trust Occam's Razor?" as though they were nothing special— or at least, nothing special as deep questions go.
Should I trust Occam's Razor? Well, how well does (any particular version of) Occam's Razor seem to work in practice? What kind of probability-theoretic justifications can I find for it? When I look at the universe, does it seem like the kind of universe in which Occam's Razor would work well?
Should I trust my brain? Obviously not; it doesn't always work. But nonetheless, the human brain seems much more powerful than the most sophisticated computer programs I could consider trusting otherwise. How well does my brain work in practice, on which sorts of problems?
When I examine the causal history of my brain—its origins in natural selection—I find, on the one hand, all sorts of specific reasons for doubt; my brain was optimized to run on the ancestral savanna, not to do math. But on the other hand, it's also clear why, loosely speaking, it's possible that the brain really could work. Natural selection would have quickly eliminated brains so completely unsuited to reasoning, so anti-helpful, as anti-Occamian or anti-Laplacian priors.
So what I did in practice, does not amount to declaring a sudden halt to questioning and justification. I'm not halting the chain of examination at the point that I encounter Occam's Razor, or my brain, or some other unquestionable. The chain of examination continues—but it continues, unavoidably, using my current brain and my current grasp on reasoning techniques. What else could I possibly use?
Indeed, no matter what I did with this dilemma, it would be me doing it. Even if I trusted something else, like some computer program, it would be my own decision to trust it.
The technique of rejecting beliefs that have absolutely no justification, is in general an extremely important one. A fundamental question of rationality is "Why do you believe what you believe?" I don't even want to say something that sounds like it might allow a single exception to the rule that everything needs justification.
Which is, itself, a dangerous sort of motivation; you can't always avoid everything that might be risky, and when someone annoys you by saying something silly, you can't reverse that stupidity to arrive at intelligence.
But I would nonetheless emphasize the difference between saying:
"Here is this assumption I cannot justify, which must be simply taken, and not further examined."
Versus saying:
"Here the inquiry continues to examine this assumption, with the full force of my present intelligence—as opposed to the full force of something else, like a random number generator or a magic 8-ball—even though my present intelligence happens to be founded on this assumption."
Still... wouldn't it be nice if we could examine the problem of how much to trust our brains without using our current intelligence? Wouldn't it be nice if we could examine the problem of how to think, without using our current grasp of rationality?
When you phrase it that way, it starts looking like the answer might be "No".
E. T. Jaynes used to say that you must always use all the information available to you—he was a Bayesian probability theorist, and had to clean up the paradoxes other people generated when they used different information at different points in their calculations. The principle of "Always put forth your true best effort" has at least as much appeal as "Never do anything that might look circular." After all, the alternative to putting forth your best effort is presumably doing less than your best.
But still... wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to justify using Occam's Razor, or justify predicting that the future will resemble the past, without assuming that those methods of reasoning which have worked on previous occasions are better than those which have continually failed?
Wouldn't it be nice if there were some chain of justifications that neither ended in an unexaminable assumption, nor was forced to examine itself under its own rules, but, instead, could be explained starting from absolute scratch to an ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness?
Well, I'd certainly be interested, but I don't expect to see it done any time soon.
Even if someone cracks the First Cause problem and comes up with the actual reason the universe is simple, which does not itself presume a simple universe... then I would still expect that the explanation could only be understood by a mindful listener, and not by, say, a rock. A listener that didn't start out already implementing modus ponens might be out of luck.
So, at the end of the day, what happens when someone keeps asking me "Why do you believe what you believe?"
At present, I start going around in a loop at the point where I explain, "I predict the future as though it will resemble the past on the simplest and most stable level of organization I can identify, because previously, this rule has usually worked to generate good results; and using the simple assumption of a simple universe, I can see why it generates good results; and I can even see how my brain might have evolved to be able to observe the universe with some degree of accuracy, if my observations are correct."
But then... haven't I just licensed circular logic?
Actually, I've just licensed reflecting on your mind's degree of trustworthiness, using your current mind as opposed to something else.
Reflection of this sort is, indeed, the reason we reject most circular logic in the first place. We want to have a coherent causal story about how our mind comes to know something, a story that explains how the process we used to arrive at our beliefs, is itself trustworthy. This is the essential demand behind the rationalist's fundamental question, "Why do you believe what you believe?"
Now suppose you write on a sheet of paper: "(1) Everything on this sheet of paper is true, (2) The mass of a helium atom is 20 grams." If that trick actually worked in real life, you would be able to know the true mass of a helium atom just by believing some circular logic which asserted it. Which would enable you to arrive at a true map of the universe sitting in your living room with the blinds drawn. Which would violate the second law of thermodynamics by generating information from nowhere. Which would not be a plausible story about how your mind could end up believing something true.
Even if you started out believing the sheet of paper, it would not seem that you had any reason for why the paper corresponded to reality. It would just be a miraculous coincidence that (a) the mass of a helium atom was 20 grams, and (b) the paper happened to say so.
Believing, in general, self-validating statement sets, does not seem like it should work to map external reality—when we reflect on it as a causal story about minds—using, of course, our current minds to do so.
But what about evolving to give more credence to simpler beliefs, and to believe that algorithms which have worked in the past are more likely to work in the future? Even when we reflect on this as a causal story of the origin of minds, it still seems like this could plausibly work to map reality.
And what about trusting reflective coherence in general? Wouldn't most possible minds, randomly generated and allowed to settle into a state of reflective coherence, be incorrect? Ah, but we evolved by natural selection; we were not generated randomly.
If trusting this argument seems worrisome to you, then forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true.
(You will, of course, use your own mind to do so.)
Is this the same as the one who says, "I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so"?
Couldn't they argue that their blind faith must also have been placed in them by God, and is therefore trustworthy?
In point of fact, when religious people finally come to reject the Bible, they do not do so by magically jumping to a non-religious state of pure emptiness, and then evaluating their religious beliefs in that non-religious state of mind, and then jumping back to a new state with their religious beliefs removed.
People go from being religious, to being non-religious, because even in a religious state of mind, doubt seeps in. They notice their prayers (and worse, the prayers of seemingly much worthier people) are not being answered. They notice that God, who speaks to them in their heart in order to provide seemingly consoling answers about the universe, is not able to tell them the hundredth digit of pi (which would be a lot more reassuring, if God's purpose were reassurance). They examine the story of God's creation of the world and damnation of unbelievers, and it doesn't seem to make sense even under their own religious premises.
Being religious doesn't make you less than human. Your brain still has the abilities of a human brain. The dangerous part is that being religious might stop you from applying those native abilities to your religion—stop you from reflecting fully on yourself. People don't heal their errors by resetting themselves to an ideal philosopher of pure emptiness and reconsidering all their sensory experiences from scratch. They heal themselves by becoming more willing to question their current beliefs, using more of the power of their current mind.
This is why it's important to distinguish between reflecting on your mind using your mind (it's not like you can use anything else) and having an unquestionable assumption that you can't reflect on.
"I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so." Well, if the Bible were an astoundingly reliable source of information about all other matters, if it had not said that grasshoppers had four legs or that the universe was created in six days, but had instead contained the Periodic Table of Elements centuries before chemistry—if the Bible had served us only well and told us only truth—then we might, in fact, be inclined to take seriously the additional statement in the Bible, that the Bible had been generated by God. We might not trust it entirely, because it could also be aliens or the Dark Lords of the Matrix, but it would at least be worth taking seriously.
Likewise, if everything else that priests had told us, turned out to be true, we might take more seriously their statement that faith had been placed in us by God and was a systematically trustworthy source—especially if people could divine the hundredth digit of pi by faith as well.
So the important part of appreciating the circularity of "I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so," is not so much that you are going to reject the idea of reflecting on your mind using your current mind. But, rather, that you realize that anything which calls into question the Bible's trustworthiness, also calls into question the Bible's assurance of its trustworthiness.
This applies to rationality too: if the future should cease to resemble the past—even on its lowest and simplest and most stable observed levels of organization—well, mostly, I'd be dead, because my brain's processes require a lawful universe where chemistry goes on working. But if somehow I survived, then I would have to start questioning the principle that the future should be predicted to be like the past.
But for now... what's the alternative to saying, "I'm going to believe that the future will be like the past on the most stable level of organization I can identify, because that's previously worked better for me than any other algorithm I've tried"?
Is it saying, "I'm going to believe that the future will not be like the past, because that algorithm has always failed before"?
At this point I feel obliged to drag up the point that rationalists are not out to win arguments with ideal philosophers of perfect emptiness; we are simply out to win. For which purpose we want to get as close to the truth as we can possibly manage. So at the end of the day, I embrace the principle: "Question your brain, question your intuitions, question your principles of rationality, using the full current force of your mind, and doing the best you can do at every point."
If one of your current principles does come up wanting—according to your own mind's examination, since you can't step outside yourself—then change it! And then go back and look at things again, using your new improved principles.
The point is not to be reflectively consistent. The point is to win. But if you look at yourself and play to win, you are making yourself more reflectively consistent—that's what it means to "play to win" while "looking at yourself".
Everything, without exception, needs justification. Sometimes—unavoidably, as far as I can tell—those justifications will go around in reflective loops. I do think that reflective loops have a meta-character which should enable one to distinguish them, by common sense, from circular logics. But anyone seriously considering a circular logic in the first place, is probably out to lunch in matters of rationality; and will simply insist that their circular logic is a "reflective loop" even if it consists of a single scrap of paper saying "Trust me". Well, you can't always optimize your rationality techniques according to the sole consideration of preventing those bent on self-destruction from abusing them.
The important thing is to hold nothing back in your criticisms of how to criticize; nor should you regard the unavoidability of loopy justifications as a warrant of immunity from questioning.
Always apply full force, whether it loops or not—do the best you can possibly do, whether it loops or not—and play, ultimately, to win.
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If you think that you can't disagree or voice disagreement in a non-offensive, non-hateful way, that you need to go against the right of all humans to live in dignity - on which all human rights are based - and which demands that humans are to be treated with respect and are to be kept safe from attacks upon their honour and reputation, then, well...
you have no basis for the right to freedom of speech either.
The right to freedom of speech needs to be limited, necessarily.
That said, not all 'hate speech laws' are really aiming to outlaw hate speech: Some modern ones do, though. Anyhow, the failure to legislate properly against it doesn't make hate speech any more acceptable.
So, no: Freedom of speech is not the freedom to offend, and certainly not the freedom to speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which may incite violence or prejudicial action or which disparages or intimidates a human being or an association of humans, which is formed through and in the excercise of their basic and fundamental human rights.
The freedom to disagree is an entirely different animal than the freedom to offend or to hate speech.
Well, where are you getting this human dignity from?
I don't actually think that there are human rights, in the sense of some eternal law that springs up from the ether. And it takes only a visit to a hospice center to put the idea of human dignity to rest.
"Human Rights" are a concept we create as a society, as rules for basic treatment of each other. But they can be abrogated, and, indeed, often are, and often have to be. And there are some that are more important than others. For example, I tend to view my right to life - that is to say, our agreement as a society that we won't go around killing each other - as more important than my right to shelter.
So I reject your premise. And I also reject even the idea of a "right not to be offended". My very existence as a non-believer offends quite a few people, who have been quite happy to tell me so. Stating that I think they are wrong about a six-day creation, in exactly those words, turns out to be even more offensive. Give these people political power and a hate speech law, and I'll be in jail for disagreeing with the Bible. No thanks. I have no desire to live in a pastel version of North Korea, which, trust me, some would happily create.
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Oh, and I would make a point about censorship (sorry Lyn :P ): Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend.
You don't need freedom of speech if you don't want to offend. No one is going to get in trouble for saying that Allah is awesome in Saudi Arabia, or that the Catholic church is wonderful in the Philippines, or that the Communist party in China is terrific. No, you get in trouble when you decide to offend people by disagreeing - most often, the people in charge.
What hate speech laws do is create a class of thoughts that it is illegal to speak. And then hand the power of enforcing such laws over to the very institutions and people who have a great interest in destroying the ability of others to oppose them. Make it illegal to call gays "sinners", and you eventually have a way to toss any Christian you like into jail. Make it illegal to call Islam bullshit, and you've essentially outlawed atheism.
And I think the idea of outlawing thoughts should be troubling. In creating rules for what people may think out loud, you're establishing a precedent for denying everyone in your society access to ideas. Sure, today it may be homophobic remarks, but let the demographics change a bit, and tomorrow it may be the teaching of evolution that is outlawed.
Well if you think i'm all for censorship... I was an ardent supporter of Charlie Hebdo for example. Even if that stems from the right to satire - which is actually not a right in most countries - I truly believe in that. When it starts to become an issue is when it stops targeting institutions, religious icons, opinions, to turn into slander, libel, or defamation, which is punishable by law pretty much everywhere (which Charlie never did afaik).
So, I believe in freedom of speech, but absolute freedom of speech seems rather dangerous to me. Should we stop censoring ISIS pamphlets on the internet out of freedom of speech ? Neo-nazi drivels and parties ? Hateful speeches inciting people to hatred and violence ? Or whatever fitting the bill ?
I'm honestly asking here. That sounds like a difficult question to me, and certainly not as simple as you make it sound.
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Sorry, Lyn, I was joking about bringing the thread back onto topic. :P
Also, great post, Saede.
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Well if you think i'm all for censorship... I was an ardent supporter of Charlie Hebdo for example. Even if that stems from the right to satire - which is actually not a right in most countries - I truly believe in that. When it starts to become an issue is when it stops targeting institutions, religious icons, opinions, to turn into slander, libel, or defamation, which is punishable by law pretty much everywhere (which Charlie never did afaik).
So, I believe in freedom of speech, but absolute freedom of speech seems rather dangerous to me. Should we stop censoring ISIS pamphlets on the internet out of freedom of speech ? Neo-nazi drivels and parties ? Hateful speeches inciting people to hatred and violence ? Or whatever fitting the bill ?
I'm honestly asking here. That sounds like a difficult question to me, and certainly not as simple as you make it sound.
Good points, and I'm not defending the right to cry fire in a crowded theater. I don't have a problem with the limits generally in America, as I think there is a difference between describing one's thoughts, and attempting to create an immediate action with them. It's a thin line, but it's there.
What really worries me is this "right not to be offended". My very existence is "offensive" to quite a lot of Muslims. Gay rights are offensive to most of the world's Muslims and quite a lot of Christians. Do we jail everyone in the next gay pride parade? Apparently. Or, at least, if we're going to be consistent.
I mean, I can play this game too. I'm offended by virtually every word a Christian or Muslim (or any other religion) apologist says. I think that they are advocates against human rights quite a lot of the time. There. Now can we jail them? Probably not. This sort of actionable "I'm offended-ness" seems to be reserved for the use of those who believe.
Or we can just agree that people, like Charlie Hebdo, are going to say things we don't like, and just accept that that's the price of guaranteeing our own right to express our beliefs.
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Oh, and I would make a point about censorship (sorry Lyn :P ): Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend.
You don't need freedom of speech if you don't want to offend. No one is going to get in trouble for saying that Allah is awesome in Saudi Arabia, or that the Catholic church is wonderful in the Philippines, or that the Communist party in China is terrific. No, you get in trouble when you decide to offend people by disagreeing - most often, the people in charge.
What hate speech laws do is create a class of thoughts that it is illegal to speak. And then hand the power of enforcing such laws over to the very institutions and people who have a great interest in destroying the ability of others to oppose them. Make it illegal to call gays "sinners", and you eventually have a way to toss any Christian you like into jail. Make it illegal to call Islam bullshit, and you've essentially outlawed atheism.
And I think the idea of outlawing thoughts should be troubling. In creating rules for what people may think out loud, you're establishing a precedent for denying everyone in your society access to ideas. Sure, today it may be homophobic remarks, but let the demographics change a bit, and tomorrow it may be the teaching of evolution that is outlawed.
Well if you think i'm all for censorship... I was an ardent supporter of Charlie Hebdo for example. Even if that stems from the right to satire - which is actually not a right in most countries - I truly believe in that. When it starts to become an issue is when it stops targeting institutions, religious icons, opinions, to turn into slander, libel, or defamation, which is punishable by law pretty much everywhere (which Charlie never did afaik).
So, I believe in freedom of speech, but absolute freedom of speech seems rather dangerous to me. Should we stop censoring ISIS pamphlets on the internet out of freedom of speech ? Neo-nazi drivels and parties ? Hateful speeches inciting people to hatred and violence ? Or whatever fitting the bill ?
I'm honestly asking here. That sounds like a difficult question to me, and certainly not as simple as you make it sound.
I don't think anything should be censored. Not the ISIS pamphlets, nothing. here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPC-isxrhTs), is a semi-relevant link with some really good reasoning (to me) for nothing to be censored. Its a bit old and not quite topical, but he makes some really good arguments for freedom of speech.
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I don't know, the main argument seems to be "it would not be America if it breaks first amendment in its absolute definition"... Well, i'm not America (thankfully then), and I think people might have different definitions of freedom of speech...
I think you may be a bit too much optimistic for your own good... If you think the masses would suddenly stop at thinking in a mob rule mentality as soon as they get free to say whatever they want (kill the jews ! yay ! kill the muslims ! kill the christians ! kill the infidels ! grarh !), i'm pretty curious to see how your lonely little cry of protest or criticism will do any good against the wild majority of the mob.
Anyway.
So if the point is really to proselytize that eve mentality of the bully where HTFU is the main rule, and that only the strong survive, that the poor fragile girl that suicided because you said cruel things to her on the internet and that guess what, she was the only culprit because you had the perfect freedom and right to tell her so, because she CHOSE to take offense, and that to begin with she should just have had to HTFU in the first place so nothing would have happened...
Yeah, right, words can harm, and pretty bad at that. Then of course, if you believe in all of this, then why not going to harass people more fragile than you because they aren't fit to live in a society where only the thick skinned (meaning, the sociopaths) can live ? Yeah, well, why not ?
That's a hyperbole ? Well yes. But it carries very loaded questions no ?
Of course in the frame of ideologies, religion, icons and the like, starts to be slightly different to mere libel, slander, and ad-personam, granted. And that's where i'm not sure you are doing any difference in your reasoning.
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Metaphysical naturalism is a claim that nature is all there is. Methodological naturalism is the assumption that we should look for natural causes for effects. I never heard or read Hitchens saying that there couldn't be a God, but rather that the evidence for such was woefully lacking.
methodological naturalism/materialism is not an assumption: It'a a methodological decision. It's made in the context of laying down the methodology of natural science.
If you - and Hitchens does that - claim that the only valid form of explanation and justification is to do so in accord with this method, you by necessity elevate this past the mere methodological decision and enter the realm of metaphysics.
If you demand empirical, that is scientific evidence for God, then you are begging the question as you previously excluded forms of evidence or reasons that might justify belief in God and reduced the options to those that won't.
By limiting justification and explanation to scientifc, empirical evidence you limit reason. And by the way: Everyday observational evidence is oftentimes far from the empirical evidence of science. It is not the same. Everyday observational evidence is oftentimes made without the context of a peer group: And a peer group is necessary to establish proper scientific evidence. Everyday observational data is quite often individual and subjective.
And especially if we deal with humans we stop to use anything like the empirical evidence of natural science to explain and justify our beliefs. If the average person explains why he went to play EVE, he will give an explanation in terms of intentions rather than the firing of neurons and the commencing muscle actions. You might claim that the former is reducible to the latter - but it's farm from obvious that such a claim has any promise to be verified anytime at all.
Two.
Well, then you'd have to find some other foundation to justify the freedom of speech. Good luck with finding empirical evidence for it. ;)
Three.
Actually, you're beginning to make me wonder if you have more than a passing acquaintance with what Hitchens wrote or spoke. I didn't claim that Hitchens said that religion was a literal mind-virus, I said that I thought it was an apt analogy.
Well, Hitchens obviously drew on his characterisation of religion as 'mind virus' on Dawkins idea of memes. Anyhow: It's not an apt analogy. First, religion doesn't spread as a virus does. Second, ideas don't work throgh analogous mechanisms as viruses do. Third, there is no evidence that it is religion "lead(ing) to them doing things harmful to themselves and others".
Fourth.
I didn't claim that my personal experience is evidence. I claim that it was my search for evidence that led to my experience. How you create a claim that I didn't make, I don't know. I am certainly not going to say "I experienced atheism, and you should become an atheist because of that". I'm saying "this is how I lost my faith".
See, and I say you didn't - according to your own statements - loose faith because of empirical, scientific evidence. It wasn't peer reviewed, you didn't use the appropriate methods and instead you decided to use methods that are the proper ones for investigating natural things in the context of natural science to examine the religious truth of texts.
And while this personal experience, on which you base your decision to become an atheist, and even anti-religious is good enough for you to come to believe what you believe, you don't extend the right to base the right to those that come to religious beliefs based on personal experience. That's kind'a skewed.
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Well, where are you getting this human dignity from?
Where are you, then, getting that right to freedom of speech (offense) from?
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I think you may be a bit too much optimistic for your own good... If you think the masses would suddenly stop at thinking in a mob rule mentality as soon as they get free to say whatever they want (kill the jews ! yay ! kill the muslims ! kill the christians ! kill the infidels ! grarh !), i'm pretty curious to see how your lonely little cry of protest or criticism will do any good against the wild majority of the mob.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't it interesting how all those things tend to happen a lot more in countries without freedom of speech? From experimental evidence, it appears that free speech doesn't eliminate these harms (see, genocide against Native Americans), but it does seem to make their occurrence much less likely. And it's also interesting that those who would be tyrants try to suppress it - for example, the Nazis used roving gangs of brownshirt thugs to silence the opposition, which is one very big reason for Hitler's success.
So if the point is really to proselytize that eve mentality of the bully where HTFU is the main rule, and that only the strong survive, that the poor fragile girl that suicided because you said cruel things to her on the internet and that guess what, she was the only culprit because you had the perfect freedom and right to tell her so, because she CHOSE to take offense, and that to begin with she should just have had to HTFU in the first place so nothing would have happened...
I think there is an easier solution for this. You should have the right to say what you want, but other's aren't required to carry it. I don't mind social media being policed by social media companies for bullying. As for bullying in person, well, that's not going to be stopped by suppressing free speech. In fact, given the nature of bullies, they will probably eventually be the ones determining what you're allowed to say.
Yeah, right, words can harm, and pretty bad at that. Then of course, if you believe in all of this, then why not going to harass people more fragile than you because they aren't fit to live in a society where only the thick skinned (meaning, the sociopaths) can live ? Yeah, well, why not ?
That's a hyperbole ? Well yes. But it carries very loaded questions no ?
i think that the solution to this is what the solution has always been: educate people on the necessity and value of treating others as they wish to be treated. Telling people that they can't say something nasty isn't going to change the fact that they are nasty, and it's probably the nastiness that we really want to change. And yes, free speech, as with any right we create, gets muddy around the edges. That's the price of living in a world where things aren't perfect.
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Sorry, Lyn, I was joking about bringing the thread back onto topic. :P
Also, great post, Saede.
The real topic was not about censorship per se by the way, but anti feminists outraged at being censored, if I believe the video in the OP.
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Just grabbing this bit here Vik, because a really super easy way to prove this point is to demonstrate to the person that they already are an atheist. They already don't believe in every other god save for their own. Its their own specific religion that they are blinded to the faults of.
Uh... nuh. Not at all flying. If I'm a theist, I'm believing in a divine person, simply speaking. What you're talking about is another kategory than the existence of divine persons: It's the question of what form the divine person(s) take: Are they one or many or a few or...
So, you're makeing a category mistake in positing that the question which form divinity takes has a bearing on the question whether divinity exists.
So when you say 'you should not have the freedom to offend someone' its actually a very dangerous thing to say, because again, offence is taken, not given.
Well, that is quite the simplification: You yourself explained how offence can be given, under the condition that the offender knows what offends. generally, there is a level of cultural and social knowledge that leads to some good idea what offends. So, given that, you have no right to offend (intentionally).
Also, not having a right to offend doesn't mean that it is necessarily prohibited to offend. Offence may be permissible in some cases, even if you don't have a right to it. If you do so unintentionally, you are not culpabale anyway.
All that said: I'm not against being offensive in some limited capacity: But when offense becomes so blatant that it devolves into hatespeech, then the victim has a right to protection - and the potentioal offender is oblieged to desist from those forms of offense.
Now, on to your proposition that you don't need evidence for beliefs to be reliable.
That's not my position at all. I said you don't need empirical (in the sense of scientific) evidence for all kinds of beliefs to be accepted as reliable. For scientific theories, e.g., you do need empirical (intersubjectively checkable and checked: peer reviewed, observable) evidence to consider it reliable. In other academic fields, like the humanities observability does not take such a precedence, for example. mathematics, e.g., is largely non-empirical. Yet, mathmatical knowledge usually exeeeds the knowledge of empirical sciences by far in reliability!
I didn't say that Science is based in Faith, either. What I said is that if you want to justify science, you can't do so with science. You need a metaphysical fundament, that is non-scientific, to justify science as a process. One can do so, quite reasonably.
IF you stand by the position that all kinds of explanations and justifications need to be scientific, THEN you have the problem where you are in a situation where the cat races after it's tail. You can't justify the principles you want to justify by themselves. The poition defeats itself, unless you commit to some fundamentalism, where science doesn't need justification, but is to be accepted without justification.
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Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't it interesting how all those things tend to happen a lot more in countries without freedom of speech? From experimental evidence, it appears that free speech doesn't eliminate these harms (see, genocide against Native Americans), but it does seem to make their occurrence much less likely. And it's also interesting that those who would be tyrants try to suppress it - for example, the Nazis used roving gangs of brownshirt thugs to silence the opposition, which is one very big reason for Hitler's success.
Ok, aside from the Godwin that wins the thread, I never said they eliminate anything. And even America first amendment is far, like very far, from what you and Saede are putting into hypothesis. Say whatever you want, you are not allowed to say absolutely anything at all in America.
I think there is an easier solution for this. You should have the right to say what you want, but other's aren't required to carry it. I don't mind social media being policed by social media companies for bullying. As for bullying in person, well, that's not going to be stopped by suppressing free speech. In fact, given the nature of bullies, they will probably eventually be the ones determining what you're allowed to say.
I'm sorry but I didn't understand anything in that statement... :/
i think that the solution to this is what the solution has always been: educate people on the necessity and value of treating others as they wish to be treated. Telling people that they can't say something nasty isn't going to change the fact that they are nasty, and it's probably the nastiness that we really want to change. And yes, free speech, as with any right we create, gets muddy around the edges. That's the price of living in a world where things aren't perfect.
I don't disagree with that, but that will not solve the issue either. And the end result is similar. Both go hand in hand, but eventually, by educating, you do exactly the complementary thing that is to tell people what is, and what isn't tolerated to say.
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Lyn, it's only a Godwin if you are comparing someone to Hitler. It's not a Godwin to use a historical example where appropriate.
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And it's also interesting that those who would be tyrants try to suppress it - for example, the Nazis used roving gangs of brownshirt thugs to silence the opposition, which is one very big reason for Hitler's success.
Actually, in those countries the victims are usually the ones of which one is allowed to call for their deaths...
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Mithra,
You have a definition of methodological naturalism which seems to contract and expand according to your argument. But it's really irrelevant. I'm not coming from methodological naturalism and then trying to say that there cannot be any other ways of knowing something. I'm coming from the fact that no other way of knowing things seems to produce results that correspond with reality, or even be internally coherent.
And if you want to respond "what's wrong with internal contradictions", or "so what if my way of knowing produces models of the world that don't seem to correspond with reality", then the conversation is over, because that sort of statement means we don't even have the use of logic. I can't give you a philosophical justification of why the law of non-contradiction is true...it's an axiom. It just is the way the world works, the way I observe the world to work.
You want to assert that I have to first adapt some sort of view to justify science. No, I don't. Science just works. And science isn't peer review, or a specific academic process. It encompasses those things, but it is first and foremost just "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.", to use the dictionary. Or, in other words, observing the world. I am perfectly entitled to notice that it works, and thus adapt the view.
Could there be other ways of knowing? Certainly. But in order to show that there are, you need to have a means of showing that they actually exist. Otherwise, I can claim that I'm receiving revelation from the Cookie Monster, that he wants you to give me all of your cookies, and you have no way of telling me I'm full of it.
How do I know that science works? Again, all I can point to is fact that it seems to. Does it really? Well, this is essentially solipsism. I can't prove that I'm not a brain in a vat imagining everything. But the reality is that this is not how people live - no one questions that science works when flying at 20,000 feet.
I'll have to disagree with your statement that everyday observational evidence is different from scientific evidence, not least because I have scientists who tell me otherwise. I'll also note that it seems a bit strange to claim that when I look at the moon with my unaided eye, that's a different sort of evidence than when I put that same eye behind a telescope.
As for free speech, I already gave a ground for human rights: human rights are created by a society trying to establish rules that apply to everyone. That's why they're so easily abrogated, and why they take so much work to maintain: because they are social constructs.
As for my de-conversion, I'd prefer to let you be the one to tell the New Testament scholars that they aren't peer-reviewed. The archaeologists too, I suppose. And the philosophers. Or if you're arguing that my deconversion wasn't scientific because I didn't have it peer-reviewed, well, I already pointed out that your definition of science is an arcane one that is in use by only you. By your definition, Newton's laws aren't scientific, because he didn't submit them to a journal.
As for using the wrong methods on religious texts, well, really. Either Jesus actually did, physically, rise from the dead, or he didn't. Either Moses really did lead the people out of Egypt, as the Bible says, or they were in Canaan all along, as the archaeologists say. Now, why is archaeology a better means of knowing? Well, it's the one with the pottery shards. Why do I value that evidence? Well, valuing evidence is the only thing that seems to work.
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That's not my position at all. I said you don't need empirical (in the sense of scientific) evidence for all kinds of beliefs to be accepted as reliable. For scientific theories, e.g., you do need empirical (intersubjectively checkable and checked: peer reviewed, observable) evidence to consider it reliable. In other academic fields, like the humanities observability does not take such a precedence, for example. mathematics, e.g., is largely non-empirical. Yet, mathmatical knowledge usually exeeeds the knowledge of empirical sciences by far in reliability!
I didn't say that Science is based in Faith, either. What I said is that if you want to justify science, you can't do so with science. You need a metaphysical fundament, that is non-scientific, to justify science as a process. One can do so, quite reasonably.
IF you stand by the position that all kinds of explanations and justifications need to be scientific, THEN you have the problem where you are in a situation where the cat races after it's tail. You can't justify the principles you want to justify by themselves. The poition defeats itself, unless you commit to some fundamentalism, where science doesn't need justification, but is to be accepted without justification.
Here's a definition of empirical: "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic."
Here's a definition of science: "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation."
Your definition of science and empiricism is not that which, apparently, other share.
How do we know that math is a way to know things? Because we observe that it works, and we establish mathematical principles from those observations that allow us to extrapolate. It took work for the human species to figure out those principles, they didn't come down to us in full form. They had to be discovered.
Now, what we do know is that science works. We don't know that "other ways of knowing work". So when we want to know if those "other ways of knowing" work, then our only recourse is to compare them to what we do know works.
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Just grabbing this bit here Vik, because a really super easy way to prove this point is to demonstrate to the person that they already are an atheist. They already don't believe in every other god save for their own. Its their own specific religion that they are blinded to the faults of.
Uh... nuh. Not at all flying. If I'm a theist, I'm believing in a divine person, simply speaking. What you're talking about is another kategory than the existence of divine persons: It's the question of what form the divine person(s) take: Are they one or many or a few or...
So, you're makeing a category mistake in positing that the question which form divinity takes has a bearing on the question whether divinity exists.
the question of whether 'divinity' exists is completely unbounded, you have to define what that divinity is in order to determine if it exists or not, else it is completely unfalsifiable. Or, to put it another way, if your observations of the universe are the same regardless of the answer, then you know nothing.
That's not my position at all. I said you don't need empirical (in the sense of scientific) evidence for all kinds of beliefs to be accepted as reliable. For scientific theories, e.g., you do need empirical (intersubjectively checkable and checked: peer reviewed, observable) evidence to consider it reliable. In other academic fields, like the humanities observability does not take such a precedence, for example. mathematics, e.g., is largely non-empirical. Yet, mathmatical knowledge usually exeeeds the knowledge of empirical sciences by far in reliability!
The best way to respond with this is to start with a question, why do you believe what you believe, and what does it mean in your schema for a belief to be reliable?
I'm stepping outside hard sciences here, I'm not referring to what it means for something to be a scientific theory, or that it be peer checked, simply, why do you believe what you believe? And what leads you to determine that your beliefs accurately map (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory) onto reality?
Surely, you would want your map to match the territory as closely as possible, so that you don't do something foolish like jump off a cliff because you believe you can fly.
The scientific method has thus far, produced by far the most accurate map of the territory, and using it we've been able to make incredibly accurate predictions about future events, and develop incredibly advanced tools. Thus if your goal is to create a model of reality that most closely corresponds with that reality, the scientific method is a rather good way of going about figuring out that model.
This is outside of classrooms, your brain does this naturally to a degree, you know if you kick a ball that it will behave in a certain way, but how, do you know that? Why do you believe what you believe?
This brings us down to the long quote in my previous post, which you really ought read.
I didn't say that Science is based in Faith, either. What I said is that if you want to justify science, you can't do so with science. You need a metaphysical fundament, that is non-scientific, to justify science as a process. One can do so, quite reasonably.
IF you stand by the position that all kinds of explanations and justifications need to be scientific, THEN you have the problem where you are in a situation where the cat races after it's tail. You can't justify the principles you want to justify by themselves. The position defeats itself, unless you commit to some fundamentalism, where science doesn't need justification, but is to be accepted without justification.
If you're really not willing to read the entire bit I quoted before, then here is an attempt to tl;dr
Here's how I treat this problem myself: I try to approach questions like "Should I trust my brain?" or "Should I trust Occam's Razor?" as though they were nothing special— or at least, nothing special as deep questions go.
Should I trust Occam's Razor? Well, how well does (any particular version of) Occam's Razor seem to work in practice? What kind of probability-theoretic justifications can I find for it? When I look at the universe, does it seem like the kind of universe in which Occam's Razor would work well?
Should I trust my brain? Obviously not; it doesn't always work. But nonetheless, the human brain seems much more powerful than the most sophisticated computer programs I could consider trusting otherwise. How well does my brain work in practice, on which sorts of problems?
When I examine the causal history of my brain—its origins in natural selection—I find, on the one hand, all sorts of specific reasons for doubt; my brain was optimized to run on the ancestral savanna, not to do math. But on the other hand, it's also clear why, loosely speaking, it's possible that the brain really could work. Natural selection would have quickly eliminated brains so completely unsuited to reasoning, so anti-helpful, as anti-Occamian or anti-Laplacian priors.
So what I did in practice, does not amount to declaring a sudden halt to questioning and justification. I'm not halting the chain of examination at the point that I encounter Occam's Razor, or my brain, or some other unquestionable. The chain of examination continues—but it continues, unavoidably, using my current brain and my current grasp on reasoning techniques. What else could I possibly use?
Indeed, no matter what I did with this dilemma, it would be me doing it. Even if I trusted something else, like some computer program, it would be my own decision to trust it.
The technique of rejecting beliefs that have absolutely no justification, is in general an extremely important one. I sometimes say that the fundamental question of rationality is "Why do you believe what you believe?" I don't even want to say something that sounds like it might allow a single exception to the rule that everything needs justification.
Which is, itself, a dangerous sort of motivation; you can't always avoid everything that might be risky, and when someone annoys you by saying something silly, you can't reverse that stupidity to arrive at intelligence.
But I would nonetheless emphasize the difference between saying:
"Here is this assumption I cannot justify, which must be simply taken, and not further examined."
Versus saying:
"Here the inquiry continues to examine this assumption, with the full force of my present intelligence—as opposed to the full force of something else, like a random number generator or a magic 8-ball—even though my present intelligence happens to be founded on this assumption."
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Vikarion, just some gems for your consideration:
"I'm coming from the fact that no other way of knowing things seems to produce results that correspond with reality, or even be internally coherent."
That's hardly a fact at all.
"You want to assert that I have to first adapt some sort of view to justify science. No, I don't. Science just works."
No, I say if (you know the meaning of 'if', do you?) you want to justify science, you can't do so by science. Obviously, you opt for fundamentalism. "Science just works." It's sink or swim.
The defintion you give for science does implicitly include peer-review, by the way. Just because it doesn't note so explicity doesn't mean it's not part of it. Also scientific observation is different in mayn ways from everyday observation. It is theory-laden and oftentimes quite indirect and is inextricably linked to experiment.
Also, even if scientific experimentation/observation is not that different from everyday observation, it sill doesn't alone suffice for having something taken as justified as knowledge by the scientific community: There needs to be review to have it accepted as such. Observation does not equal justification, in science: The observation needs to be repeatable independently from the original observer.
You seem quite naive when it comes to science and what it is. It's obvious you are not more than remotely acknowledged with theory of science. Well, if you follow a naive idea of what science is, and go with your unreflected epistemology, then one might see not how there's a big difference between scientific experimentation and everyday observation.
That's a rather uncritical thing to do so. But sure, feel free to!
"Could there be other ways of knowing? Certainly. But in order to show that there are, you need to have a means of showing that they actually exist."
The hallmark of fundamentalism: You Say that "Science just works." and you don't need to justify it. Yet, other ways of knowing have to be justified? You are "perfectly entitled to notice that it (science) works, and thus adapt the view", while others are not entitlked as perfectly to notice that a religious worldview works for them and to adapt it? You really have no better reasons there than the religious fundamentalist.
And of course you have the same claim to having the superior turth as if there should be other ways of knowing, they have to be proved: Of course on your terms.
Sheesh. There's no sense in discussing this. Just be happy with your worldview, you're not willing to change it anyway.
Theologians, archaeologists, philosophers are of course peer-reviewed. I'm quite sure, though, that they didn't come to the 'scientific' conclusion that God doesn't exist. That's most certainly a private conclusion you personally came to. Not every scientist is a Dawkins. In fact most aren't. Just see what Higgs had to say on the compatibility of science and religion and what he thinks about Dawkins.
(By the way, Newton had his laws peer-reviewed. Before the rise of jounrals they had letters circulating in the scientific cummunity for this. peer review doesn't necessarily imply publication in a journal. Shocking, I know! There's even a movement in the scientific community that is against journals and advocates for a more open, communal peer review through internet resources.)
The problem you have with religious texts is that you assume them to speak about empirical truths. Well, they don't. it's interesting that you put so much worth on the literal meaning of Scripture - when you are so fast to defend Hitchens by saying he usues analogies. Why is Hitchens allowed to use those, when the Bible can't use analogy and metaphor?
So, congratulation. You noticed that the bible doesn't give a litterally accurate account of historical events. Well, newsflash: That was something Augustine pointed out already around 400 CE. Scholars of the Torah found out that the authors and editors of the text never meant it to be read litterally (at least not exclusively and certain parts most certainly not at all) but rather with an understanding that it was filled with allegories and metaphorical meaning.
They quite probably even built in literal contradictions in the text as a means to make clear that the reader is not to understand the text literally at all. So, you seem to ignore the tradition in which and the intention with which the text was written. Not the best practice in the study of literature.
So, the logical fallacy you commited is that after finding out that the holy books don't speak the truth in some matters, they don't tell truth in all matters. 'Some' is logically subaltern to 'all', though - not the other way around.
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Relevant to OP (though not the theism/antitheism discussion)
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png)
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Mithra,
I'm not trying to say that science is right just because science is right. I'm trying to say that, when we use science, it seems to be a reliable way of gaining knowledge about the world. It seems to be reliable in part because it works. Now, because I'm observing that it works, does that mean it is self-justifying? Well, sorta. I can't stop observing, I don't think anyone can.
Are you trying to argue that science does not work? If not, if you agree that science produces predictions that are fulfilled, machines that work, then I would say that science is, in the sense of probability, self-proving. Do we really know that science works? Well, if we don't, the level at which we have placed the bar for "knowing" is too high for anything to reach.
I won't comment on your ad hominems, but I will say this: do I think that the scientific process involves peer review, debate, experiment? Yes. Is that all science is? No, that is advanced methodology for being more certain of conclusions. But when Galileo decided to drop weights to see if they fell at the same rate, that was also science, his observations were science, the doing of science.
When I say "works", however, I do not mean that science works for me. Scientific advances and predictions work for everyone. We seem to be sharing a common reality in which, for example, atomic theory works for everyone, and thus, your computer works.
But other ways of knowing, or at least some other ways of knowing, don't seem to have that universality or real-world compatibility. I think it should be obvious that, for example, Islam and Hinduism cannot both be true. How do you know if they are true?
A thought experiment: suppose Christianity could be shown to be false in every supernatural claim, by evidence. Would it still be a valid way of knowing? A way of knowing what? That's the point I was making about whether something actually happened, such as Moses and the Exodus. I didn't lose my faith because I found out Genesis wasn't literal or that the earth is old.
It is entirely possible to muddy the waters and create justifications for believing things. But what I'm interested in is knowing if what I believe is really true. I prefer to know what actually happened in the past, and what is actually possible in the future. Now, I already have one system - one way of knowing - which I know, as much as it is possible to know anything, works. Not just for me, but for everyone. Not perfectly, but very well. Given that it does work for everyone, in the sense of giving us a good map of reality, I think that it is reasonable to adapt it.
Now, suppose I am presented with other "ways of knowing". How do I know that they are truthful, that they are real? Suppose I was a Heaven's Gate cult member - am I really going to go to a spaceship in the sky if I commit suicide? Shouldn't I be worried about whether this way of knowing is true? Not just "true for me", but actually something that corresponds to reality? There's a lot riding on that.
The only way I see to validate "ways of knowing" as truth or not is to compare them with the one that seems true already. Yes, I observed that science produces results, but observation is all we have. We have to start somewhere.
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the question of whether 'divinity' exists is completely unbounded, you have to define what that divinity is in order to determine if it exists or not, else it is completely unfalsifiable. Or, to put it another way, if your observations of the universe are the same regardless of the answer, then you know nothing.
Well, a lot of statements are per se unfalsifiable. Even in science, most statements are only falsifiable on the background of statements that are accepted as true. It's called confirmation holism.
So, a claim or statement might be unfalsifiable, but you still might have good reason to accept it, given the alternatives.
The best way to respond with this is to start with a question, why do you believe what you believe, and what does it mean in your schema for a belief to be reliable?
I'm stepping outside hard sciences here, I'm not referring to what it means for something to be a scientific theory, or that it be peer checked, simply, why do you believe what you believe? And what leads you to determine that your beliefs accurately map (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory) onto reality?
Honestly, I think most people don't really know this. And I also think that those that do, don't grasp how profound this question is - they are either uncritical, naive or both - for the most part.
That said, there are some minimal requirements, I think:
First, I believe that it is a good starting point to check the belief on the background of the other beliefs: For a belief to be justifiably held, it needs to form a coherent system of beliefs with other beliefs. To be coherent the system needs necessarily be consistent, of course, as consitency is implied by coherence.
I would put more weight on consistency of course, as it is the precondition to coherence. Yet, the more coherent a system of beliefs is, while accomodating a greater number of beliefs, the better.
There are of course other factors that play a role, and many of those are 'empirical' in a rather broad sense in that they are experiential. That would include 'scientific evidence' but also other factors like 'introspection' or such.
Then there are non-'empirical' factors, I'd say: Properly understanding the definition of 'square' has nothing to do with experience, I'd say. (While I'm sure others may disagree.)
For counting a belief as reliable, it should be, at least, justified.
The "mapping problem" is then dependent on what kind of reality you try to 'map'. Modern natural science has a very specific idea about what it wants to achieve, it enters, so to speak, with an idea about the reality - or part of reality - it wants to examine into the game of map-making. It has been quite successful in achieving this and I admire science for this. But that doesn't mean, logically, that you can't go out with the aim to make other maps of other parts of reality.
If I want to look at the the reality of ethics, I might limit myself if I use the same critera there. There is no easy way to empirically measure 'good' or 'evil', 'right' or 'wrong'. To give an example, the methods of questioning, debate, argument as used by philosophical ethics are - in my opinion - more suited to that piece of reality than methods that are reduced to counting 'what people hold to be good' or 'what people hold to be evil; right or wrong'.
To stay in the metaphor of the map: If you go out on ground to map the northern european lowlands, you will have to use other cartographic methods than when mapping the andean mountains. In one case you can reasonable assume to work on the surface of a spheroid - in the other case you can't. In one case you might want to prepare by getting a bike or a car - in the other you might miss important parts if you limit yourself to the parts that are reachable on wheels.
Also, while in the case of the geographical map, basically the methods of measuring the structure of the landscape might apply all the same, it is quite unclear - and to be honest I think rather absurd - to think that the methods of natural science (which have been decided on and eveloped to give no regard to things as 'good' and 'evil') are a good fit for the study of ethics.
[/quote]The scientific method has thus far, produced by far the most accurate map of the territory, and using it we've been able to make incredibly accurate predictions about future events, and develop incredibly advanced tools. Thus if your goal is to create a model of reality that most closely corresponds with that reality, the scientific method is a rather good way of going about figuring out that model.[/quote]
This, as I already intimated above, is a question of what you take reality to be. In my opinion, Science is hughely successful in 'mapping' the part of reality it sets out to map. And don't get me wrong: That is a great thing! I'm all for science and using the scientific approach on those parts of reality that it aims to explore.
But to assume that because science is so successfull in producing reliable belief, that all reliable belief must be scientific is a fallacy. It just doesn't follow.
On the one hand it obstructs the view on the fact that we have a lot of reliable beliefs - tested in and by millions of years prior to the rise of modern science and merely confirmed by the latter - that we would have - rightfully so - without modern science.
This brings us down to the long quote in my previous post, which you really ought read.
On the other hand it obstructs the view on the fact that (natural) science was in fact developed to not give an account of the entirety of reality, but only of the natural aspects of it. The humanities have made progess as well, if not as spectacular as the sciences. Does that mean that science is better to examine the phenomena which the humanities set out to explore? I highly doubt it, to put it mildly.
If you're really not willing to read the entire bit I quoted before, then here is an attempt to tl;dr
Actually, I read the entire bit. I am rather sympathetic to the ideal of going on to question. I'm no stranger to that, I'd say. That's why I insisted that I don't think that you need 'faith' in science, even though you need to go beyond science in my opinion: There are other capacities of reason which allow us to look for justifications of science without necessarily becoming religious (though religious thought might be suitable to justify science, maybe).
It's also that I'm really not holding the belief that one doesn't need evidence for a belief to be reliable: I'm thinking it depends on what 'part of reality' the belief tries to 'map to' whether you need scientific, empirical evidence.
So, while largely agreeing with what you have as last part, there, I felt it important to point out that I'm neither saying 'you need (religious) faith to justify science' nor that I say 'scientifc evidence is useless'.
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I don't see the point in a thread where people are simply quoting other people's opinions at each other.
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Vikarion,
I'm not at all trying to say that science does not work. Of course it does. And I'm personally all for science. It works astonishingly well for the part of reality it aims to examine and explain in a way that allows for reliable reproduction of events.
I would even go so far to say that of all forms of producing knowledge and of knowing, science has, arguable, the best and most exclusive access to that part of reality.
What I'm opposed to is the idea that science has a priveleged and exclusive access to all of reality and that it is what we should use to measure all other forms of knowledge and getting to know.
Let me give an example: There is a guy who is your best friend. It just clicked with the two of you waaay back in the sandbox and since you have been bffs. This is about personal relations, obviously, and not, strictly speaking laws of nature. It's a singular, contingent, historical event. It's something science doesn't really aim to explain: And while it might be true that science could one day give a full causal explanation (that's the business of science to a large degree) of this friendship, I think that at the moment the best explanation is one that referrs to emotions, intentions and character of the two of you - which all are not readily translateble to brain states, hormone levels and such. At least not yet.
So the latter kind of explanation, which one might call a 'personal explanation' seem much more appropriate for explaining a singular, contingent, historical event than the explanations of science which aim and generality and repeatability. And I don't think that the fact that getting friends with your friend didn't work out equally for everyone else makes that friendship less real. Nor is the personal explanation any less good or matches reality less: Rather, by giveng reasons why it is not a repeatable event it matches reality more closely than some description of barin states, hormones and the like that is, theoretically, repeatable.
I think that what religion aims at with it's analogies and metaphors is similarly a personal relationship, rather than historical truth and also an isntruction how everyone, earnestly looking out for it, can enter into such a relation.
That of course doesn't make it true that there is a being or a number of beings with which you can enter into a relation with. Yet, I think it says you shouldn't examine religion like it's aiming to talk about laws of nature or historical truths. And thus, one should examine it not with the tools that are suited to the latter two.
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I don't see the point in a thread where people are simply quoting other people's opinions at each other.
The point is called 'exchange of opinions'. :D
Maybe also 'reaching understanding'.
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Mithra,
I think part of this is a misunderstanding. For example, in your friend analogy, I would never say that it is only accurate to describe things in scientific terms. I mean, there goes art, literature...ouch.
What I am referring to is the primacy of science as a means to test other beliefs. Suppose, taking your example, that I use my experience to claim that human friendship has nothing to do with chemicals in the brain. My argument is that such a statement should be not be given credence, given what we know by science about the brain.
Now, if you want to argue that one can have or hold beliefs that are not strictly scientifically proven, and know things by them, well, quite possibly. I mean, if that's religion, well, I hold some tenets of Buddhist philosophy. Can I scientifically prove them? Not currently. Do they work for me? Yes. But they also don't contradict science.
I don't know what country you come from. I live in America. And I can tell you, the majority of Christians here are not taking the Bible as allegorical, personal advice. No, they think the things in it actually happened, and not only do they want to enforce its rules on others, they are pretty insistent on claiming that every other belief system is evil.
So, if you want to say that beliefs which do not contradict science are valid, or at least some of them are, well, that's a ripe area for discussion. But it's another thing entirely for me to agree that the young-earth creationist has as valid a viewpoint as the geologist. If you aren't saying that, then cool.
The other point I would make is that I find belief in supernatural entities to be somewhat in the vein of things which contradict science. Given what we know about reality, supernatural existence or interference seems exceedingly unlikely, and it seems highly likely that experiences of the supernatural exist only in the brain, especially given that we can now induce some of them at will.
I think that our willingness to believe a proposition should be proportionate to its agreement with science.
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I don't see the point in a thread where people are simply quoting other people's opinions at each other.
The point is called 'exchange of opinions'. :D
Maybe also 'reaching understanding'.
well, it's like:
Person A: I think this
Person B: No, that is wrong because Some Dude wrote Some Thing that I'm quoting from.
But what does person B really think, for themselves, about the subject ?
I don't see the point in reading what Some Dude thinks about the subject, cos I can do that on Some Dude's website, rather than here.
but whatever.
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Relevant to OP (though not the theism/antitheism discussion)
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png)
My thoughts exactly, a few people have told me I am bad for boycotting chick-fil-a over the things the owner says and does, but as much as he has the right to speak I have the right to exercise consequences for that speech including not spending money where profits might be spend in ways that negatively effect LGBT people like myself.
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Okay, question then for you Nico? Where do you draw the line between where reality stops and where beliefs and ideas begin?
You say that something like the scientific method is ill suited to the discussion of something like ethics, but I disagree, using the scientific method we can make all sorts of tests and predictions and experiments that determine how people respond to certain stimuli and such.
Can science tell us what is right and wrong? No, because those are subjective human ideas, we created them, so we get to decide what they mean. That said, once we've decided what they mean, we can use science to determine if something falls into one category or another. Science is useful for building the map of reality, in fact, I would argue there is no better way to map reality, because any other way to map reality fails to take that reality into account when making the map.
Suppose you write on a sheet of paper: "(1) Everything on this sheet of paper is true, (2) The mass of a helium atom is 20 grams." If that trick actually worked in real life, you would be able to know the true mass of a helium atom just by believing some circular logic which asserted it. Which would enable you to arrive at a true map of the universe sitting in your living room with the blinds drawn. Which would violate the second law of thermodynamics by generating information from nowhere. Which would not be a plausible story about how your mind could end up believing something true.
Experimental data and observational data are necessary for the construction of an actual map. You can't make an accurate map of a city you've never been in from inside a locked room with nothing but a sheet of paper. How else would you do it that wasn't just pulling the information out of thin air and stating it to be correct? If not by experiential or observational evidence, if not attached to something, then your belief is floating, (http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/) not connected to anything but itself and other beliefs, without changing your anticipated experiences. How does your anticipated experience change as a result of a certain belief, and if it doesn't, then what purpose does the belief serve to aid you in navigating the world?
A belief in something like freedom isn't unscientific, a belief in a certain system of ethics isn't necessarily unscientific either. On the contrary science, by telling us more about the world, has a great potential to improve our systems of ethics. We know thanks to science that there's really no difference between races, we know thanks to science that animals aren't so different than us, just as two examples.
I can easily believe in freedom, freedom is a particular idea that is generated in the human mind by a particular arrangement of firing neurons, and it might have slightly different connotations to others. I can even believe that freedom is a good thing based on the knowledge that other people are like me, and I don't like having no choices, so they probably don't like having no choices either.
Science is a tool that is used to increase our understanding of the territory, so that we can have an accurate map by which to navigate. Its clear that having a more accurate map leads to more ways to use the territory as evidenced by our increasingly powerful technology as our map has grown more accurate. Science is the most powerful tool we have, and there is no reason not to apply it to everything we can. There is no special barrier beyond which the scientific method cannot be used. And yes that does end up requiring science to prove itself, but why would you not attempt to discern the truth using the most powerful tool in your arsenal? There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. You can't step outside of yourself so you're always limited to using your own mind.
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well, it's like:
Person A: I think this
Person B: No, that is wrong because Some Dude wrote Some Thing that I'm quoting from.
But what does person B really think, for themselves, about the subject ?
Perhaps because person B feels this thing they're quoting from expresses their thoughts on the matter more eloquently then they would be able to?
I don't see the point in reading what Some Dude thinks about the subject, cos I can do that on Some Dude's website, rather than here.
but whatever.
For the same reason you quote sections of other authors when writing an essay, to pull out parts that are relevant to the specific instance of the discussion you are having or the position you are advocating.
(http://i.imgur.com/R9vnQUA.jpg)
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Hello again, Vikarion.
I am certainly not from the US: I'm from Germany. To me literalism and young-earth creationists are, admittedly, a bunch of far-away guys, which hold weird views on what the bible is talking about. They are, also at odds with christian tradition, which always placed more importance on the spiritual message of the Bible than on it being correct on a literal level.
That said, I'm quite sure that there are Christians in the US aside the literalists and young-earth- creationsists and I personally think it is an overreaction to damn religion in general or Christians in particular for those that depart from tradition and oppose science, when that's not at all necessary.
Also, I don't think that you need to assume interference in the natrual workings of the world, if you believe in a dininity. Nor do I think that 'supernatural experiences' are needed for belief in divinity. I, personally, don't think that one needs 'gaps' in the frame of nature for God to exists. Rather, if someone believes in divinity, I'd rather expect them to not think that the divinity left 'gaps'.
Anyhow, I indeed do claim that religion and science can co-exist. There is no necessary clash between the two. They deal with different aspects of reality: They might overlap here and there to a degree that's smaller or larger, but basically both try to make sense of reality in their own way. Optimally they are complementing each other.
If you're not inclined to religion, though, there's nothing wrong with that, to me.
One last point: While I would agree that one shouldn't put credence to a claim that says that freindship has nothing to do with hormones and such, I would give as little credence, honestly, to someone who tells you that there is no such thing as friendship, but just chemical reactions in the brain. So, for me, this goes both ways, therefore I see no reason to ascribe a 'primacy' to science.
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Okay, question then for you Nico? Where do you draw the line between where reality stops and where beliefs and ideas begin?
It is obvious to me that beliefs and ideas are part of reality. The question is, if it is an idea or belief about something, is there this something they are about really existing and how good do they match it?
You say that something like the scientific method is ill suited to the discussion of something like ethics, but I disagree, using the scientific method we can make all sorts of tests and predictions and experiments that determine how people respond to certain stimuli and such.
Well, I don't say science can't contribute to ethics in some way. But it never hits the truely important part of ethics: Ethics, at it's heart, is dealing with norms, science aims to describe. Descriptions of how things are might be helpful in organizing things how they ought to be, but they do utterly fail in determining how they ought to be.
Can science tell us what is right and wrong? No, because those are subjective human ideas, we created them, so we get to decide what they mean. That said, once we've decided what they mean, we can use science to determine if something falls into one category or another. Science is useful for building the map of reality, in fact, I would argue there is no better way to map reality, because any other way to map reality fails to take that reality into account when making the map.
Well, it is far from obvious that right and wrong are nothing but human ideas, based on convention. I highly doubt it. Even so, if you point out that people have different ideas about what is ethically right and wrong you are right about that. One can easily have different ideas of the very same thing, based on perspective: Like a cylinder that, from one perspective, seems to be a cricle and from the other perspective a square - until you realize it's neither, properly. Also, people can and do err.
So, there are plenty of reasons why people might have in part vastly different ideas about what is ethically right, when those all are in fact based on what actually is ethically right.
If you subscribe to ethical subjectivism your approach might work out. But you will get into trouble at the very first step: With working out what they 'mean'. because, if ethical categories are merely conventional, then there is no obligation to agree on a meaning at all.
Thus, ethical subjectivism seem to be on the one hand kind'a self-defeating to me on the other hand missing the entire point of ethics: that there are categories that have normative power.
Suppose you write on a sheet of paper: "(1) Everything on this sheet of paper is true, (2) The mass of a helium atom is 20 grams." If that trick actually worked in real life, you would be able to know the true mass of a helium atom just by believing some circular logic which asserted it. Which would enable you to arrive at a true map of the universe sitting in your living room with the blinds drawn. Which would violate the second law of thermodynamics by generating information from nowhere. Which would not be a plausible story about how your mind could end up believing something true.
Experimental data and observational data are necessary for the construction of an actual map. You can't make an accurate map of a city you've never been in from inside a locked room with nothing but a sheet of paper. How else would you do it that wasn't just pulling the information out of thin air and stating it to be correct? If not by experiential or observational evidence, if not attached to something, then your belief is floating, (http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/) not connected to anything but itself and other beliefs, without changing your anticipated experiences. How does your anticipated experience change as a result of a certain belief, and if it doesn't, then what purpose does the belief serve to aid you in navigating the world?
Well, this is kind'a true if you deal with the natural world. Yet, in fact, mathematics does things exactly what you suppose in your thought experiment. It starts with axioms, which are simply taken to be true and extends from there on by various mathematical operations. Whatever you get there, there is no need at all that this connects to the natrual world as examined by science. Like, you will probably never, ever find a perfect circle in nature. It's a pure object of thought, if you will. (And of course it doesn't has any impact on the working of the laws of nature, the information isn't coming from 'nowhere', because your body is an open system and it's pulling the energy needed in from out there.)
Yet, you build a map of the mathematical reality. You find mathematical truths. and some of these are even applicable in the natural world. In fact modern science depends on mathematics to work. Which is kind'a funny: You need maths, that couldn't care less for the natural world, to describe the natural world effectively and exactly. Many of the breakthroughs of natural science wouldn't have been possible if mathematicians would have cared to make their theorems match the 'natural world'.
A belief in something like freedom isn't unscientific, a belief in a certain system of ethics isn't necessarily unscientific either. On the contrary science, by telling us more about the world, has a great potential to improve our systems of ethics. We know thanks to science that there's really no difference between races, we know thanks to science that animals aren't so different than us, just as two examples.
But again, that is really not doing anything, directly, in ethics. While we now know that there are no biological races (Science doesn't tell us that there are races, which are not different. It tells us that because there are no really distinguishing inheritable differences, it makes no scientific sense to speak of different human races.) withing the species Homo sapiens, that doesn't really mean that we should treat dark-skinned people the same way as light-skinned people. Only if you add the premise that 'if there are no biological races, then all humans should be treated the same', then anything follows for ethics from those scientific findings. Also, one shouldn't be silent on the fact that ethical considerations had influence on the definitions used for 'race' in biology after WWII. Nowadays biologist rarely, if at all, speak of 'races' because of the baggage of the term. What's used usually instead is the term 'sub-species'.
Similar things are true for the cat example. So, science has at best an auxiliary role in ethics. So, while in a sense all knowledge is ethical, for example it really helps to know that fish need oxygen in the water to breathe and that under certain conditions oxygen gets scarce in a fish bowl, that is really ethically neutral until you add the premise that 'You really should not let your pet fish die!'. And what you should or should not do with your pet fish won't be derivable from scientific knowledge.
Furthermore, scientific knowledge can be used to commit unethical acts. If you do know the conditions that lead to a drainage of oxygen from water and that fish need oxygen, it is quite easy for you to kill the fish, even if you shouldn't do so.
So, scientific knowledge is instrumental, while properly ethical knowledge is not. Ethical knowledge sets ultimate goals.
I can easily believe in freedom, freedom is a particular idea that is generated in the human mind by a particular arrangement of firing neurons, and it might have slightly different connotations to others. I can even believe that freedom is a good thing based on the knowledge that other people are like me, and I don't like having no choices, so they probably don't like having no choices either.
Well, but all that doesn't mean that people should be free. There's nothing normative in this consideration of freedom so far. You're merely describing things. To make it ethical, you need to add a premise of the type: "If people are like me and don't like haveing freedom of choice, they should have freedom of choice."
Also, while I'd would agree that the 'idea of freedom' can be described as being generated in the brain by firing neurons, it is a stretch to come to the conclusion that this is a full description. I highly doubt that it is, because natural science doesn't aim at giving full descriptions. It's aiming at generalized descriptions. Anyhow, even if it would be a full description of how the idea of freedom is generated, it would be a far stretch, again, to say that freedom is nothing but that idea that is generated in the brain.
Science is a tool that is used to increase our understanding of the territory, so that we can have an accurate map by which to navigate. Its clear that having a more accurate map leads to more ways to use the territory as evidenced by our increasingly powerful technology as our map has grown more accurate. Science is the most powerful tool we have, and there is no reason not to apply it to everything we can. There is no special barrier beyond which the scientific method cannot be used.
And yes that does end up requiring science to prove itself, but why would you not attempt to discern the truth using the most powerful tool in your arsenal? There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. You can't step outside of yourself so you're always limited to using your own mind.
Of course there is! Science has boundaries. It is tailored to examine the natural world. If you examine the history of science and read up on the theory of science you will notice that what is nowadays simply called 'science' was and still is but one field amongst others. The idea that because science has been so successful in examining, explaining and then predicting the field of study it has been it has to be ablke to explain everything is outright absurd.
Let me try to put it into an analogy: Say, for some reason you put really great effort into developing a tool to drive bolts into stuff. No, you don't have just a screwdriver. You really put some effort into it: You applied a clutch to it that slips at a preset torque. It is electrically powered. it comes with a ratchet action. And it looks just badass:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Makita_Auto-feed_Screwdriver.jpg/800px-Makita_Auto-feed_Screwdriver.jpg)
Yeeehaaa! :D I love that baby. (Actually, I have no idea if it's any good. I just think it looks hot (for a screwdriver)! This is no endorsement of the product!)
Furthermore, let us assume that for whatever reason soever, the guys responsible for getting the nailing done stuck to their simple, manual hammers:
(http://www.duden.de/_media_/full/H/Hammer-201100278291.jpg)
So, arguably and near to certainty without a doubt that screwdriver is the most powerful tool in your toolbag.
Why not using it for everything?
Kind'a obvious. If you have that great screwdriver, every problem might look like driving a screw in. But that doesn't make it so. Use the screwdriver where it is appropriate to use it. Just like the other tools, which you hopefully didn't throw away.
Don't screw around with that thing!
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Okay, question then for you Nico? Where do you draw the line between where reality stops and where beliefs and ideas begin?
It is obvious to me that beliefs and ideas are part of reality. The question is, if it is an idea or belief about something, is there this something they are about really existing and how good do they match it?
That's a great place to start. A good way I like to think of it is, does a belief accurately correspond to reality? If so, we call that belief true, if not, we call it false. A good way I find to distil down truth as a concept is to simply describe it as a belief that accurately maps to reality and allows meaningful predictions about that reality to be made.
You say that something like the scientific method is ill suited to the discussion of something like ethics, but I disagree, using the scientific method we can make all sorts of tests and predictions and experiments that determine how people respond to certain stimuli and such.
Well, I don't say science can't contribute to ethics in some way. But it never hits the truely important part of ethics: Ethics, at it's heart, is dealing with norms, science aims to describe. Descriptions of how things are might be helpful in organizing things how they ought to be, but they do utterly fail in determining how they ought to be.
No of course not, its up to us to determine how things ought to be, as rational agents. Its true that science cannot make moral decisions for us, but it can inform our decisions, and lead us to make more intelligent ones, and therein I feel it contributes usefully. How things ought to be is totally subjective, we decide that. I can say 'war is good' and you can say 'war is bad' and that doesn't make either of us right or wrong because good and bad are entirely subjective terms and we could mean entirely different things by them.
Can science tell us what is right and wrong? No, because those are subjective human ideas, we created them, so we get to decide what they mean. That said, once we've decided what they mean, we can use science to determine if something falls into one category or another. Science is useful for building the map of reality, in fact, I would argue there is no better way to map reality, because any other way to map reality fails to take that reality into account when making the map.
Well, it is far from obvious that right and wrong are nothing but human ideas, based on convention. I highly doubt it. Even so, if you point out that people have different ideas about what is ethically right and wrong you are right about that. One can easily have different ideas of the very same thing, based on perspective: Like a cylinder that, from one perspective, seems to be a cricle and from the other perspective a square - until you realize it's neither, properly. Also, people can and do err.
So, there are plenty of reasons why people might have in part vastly different ideas about what is ethically right, when those all are in fact based on what actually is ethically right.
If you subscribe to ethical subjectivism your approach might work out. But you will get into trouble at the very first step: With working out what they 'mean'. because, if ethical categories are merely conventional, then there is no obligation to agree on a meaning at all.
Thus, ethical subjectivism seem to be on the one hand kind'a self-defeating to me on the other hand missing the entire point of ethics: that there are categories that have normative power.
You seem to subscribe to an objective system of ethics, which I can't quite understand. How can ethics be anything other then subjective, given that they are a human creation? Do you think there is some objective ethics embedded into the structure of the universe? (http://lesswrong.com/lw/rr/the_moral_void/)
Suppose you write on a sheet of paper: "(1) Everything on this sheet of paper is true, (2) The mass of a helium atom is 20 grams." If that trick actually worked in real life, you would be able to know the true mass of a helium atom just by believing some circular logic which asserted it. Which would enable you to arrive at a true map of the universe sitting in your living room with the blinds drawn. Which would violate the second law of thermodynamics by generating information from nowhere. Which would not be a plausible story about how your mind could end up believing something true.
Experimental data and observational data are necessary for the construction of an actual map. You can't make an accurate map of a city you've never been in from inside a locked room with nothing but a sheet of paper. How else would you do it that wasn't just pulling the information out of thin air and stating it to be correct? If not by experiential or observational evidence, if not attached to something, then your belief is floating, (http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/) not connected to anything but itself and other beliefs, without changing your anticipated experiences. How does your anticipated experience change as a result of a certain belief, and if it doesn't, then what purpose does the belief serve to aid you in navigating the world?
Well, this is kind'a true if you deal with the natural world. Yet, in fact, mathematics does things exactly what you suppose in your thought experiment. It starts with axioms, which are simply taken to be true and extends from there on by various mathematical operations. Whatever you get there, there is no need at all that this connects to the natrual world as examined by science. Like, you will probably never, ever find a perfect circle in nature. It's a pure object of thought, if you will. (And of course it doesn't has any impact on the working of the laws of nature, the information isn't coming from 'nowhere', because your body is an open system and it's pulling the energy needed in from out there.)
Yet, you build a map of the mathematical reality. You find mathematical truths. and some of these are even applicable in the natural world. In fact modern science depends on mathematics to work. Which is kind'a funny: You need maths, that couldn't care less for the natural world, to describe the natural world effectively and exactly. Many of the breakthroughs of natural science wouldn't have been possible if mathematicians would have cared to make their theorems match the 'natural world'.
mathematics as absolutely scientific. You can test for yourself that 2+2=4, all other mathematical proofs are extrapolated from things that can be proven within the human ability to know anything. Having accurate maths also certainly aids your navigation of the world, thinking 2+2=3 will quickly lead you astray.
A belief in something like freedom isn't unscientific, a belief in a certain system of ethics isn't necessarily unscientific either. On the contrary science, by telling us more about the world, has a great potential to improve our systems of ethics. We know thanks to science that there's really no difference between races, we know thanks to science that animals aren't so different than us, just as two examples.
But again, that is really not doing anything, directly, in ethics. While we now know that there are no biological races (Science doesn't tell us that there are races, which are not different. It tells us that because there are no really distinguishing inheritable differences, it makes no scientific sense to speak of different human races.) withing the species Homo sapiens, that doesn't really mean that we should treat dark-skinned people the same way as light-skinned people. Only if you add the premise that 'if there are no biological races, then all humans should be treated the same', then anything follows for ethics from those scientific findings. Also, one shouldn't be silent on the fact that ethical considerations had influence on the definitions used for 'race' in biology after WWII. Nowadays biologist rarely, if at all, speak of 'races' because of the baggage of the term. What's used usually instead is the term 'sub-species'.
Similar things are true for the cat example. So, science has at best an auxiliary role in ethics. So, while in a sense all knowledge is ethical, for example it really helps to know that fish need oxygen in the water to breathe and that under certain conditions oxygen gets scarce in a fish bowl, that is really ethically neutral until you add the premise that 'You really should not let your pet fish die!'. And what you should or should not do with your pet fish won't be derivable from scientific knowledge.
Furthermore, scientific knowledge can be used to commit unethical acts. If you do know the conditions that lead to a drainage of oxygen from water and that fish need oxygen, it is quite easy for you to kill the fish, even if you shouldn't do so.
So, scientific knowledge is instrumental, while properly ethical knowledge is not. Ethical knowledge sets ultimate goals.
Again, ethical knowledge is still rooted in human minds, and thus can still be understood via an understanding of human minds, even predicted by understanding sufficiently. We can ultimately decide whether or not to let the fish die, there is no outside force deciding whether the fish living or dying is right or wrong, that is something for us to decide as humans, when we decide what right and wrong are.
I can easily believe in freedom, freedom is a particular idea that is generated in the human mind by a particular arrangement of firing neurons, and it might have slightly different connotations to others. I can even believe that freedom is a good thing based on the knowledge that other people are like me, and I don't like having no choices, so they probably don't like having no choices either.
Well, but all that doesn't mean that people should be free. There's nothing normative in this consideration of freedom so far. You're merely describing things. To make it ethical, you need to add a premise of the type: "If people are like me and don't like haveing freedom of choice, they should have freedom of choice."
Also, while I'd would agree that the 'idea of freedom' can be described as being generated in the brain by firing neurons, it is a stretch to come to the conclusion that this is a full description. I highly doubt that it is, because natural science doesn't aim at giving full descriptions. It's aiming at generalized descriptions. Anyhow, even if it would be a full description of how the idea of freedom is generated, it would be a far stretch, again, to say that freedom is nothing but that idea that is generated in the brain.
if freedom is more then an idea generated in the brain and constructed within the fabric of culture, then what is it? Is it some force in the universe? If it isn't in our heads then where is it?
Science is a tool that is used to increase our understanding of the territory, so that we can have an accurate map by which to navigate. Its clear that having a more accurate map leads to more ways to use the territory as evidenced by our increasingly powerful technology as our map has grown more accurate. Science is the most powerful tool we have, and there is no reason not to apply it to everything we can. There is no special barrier beyond which the scientific method cannot be used.
And yes that does end up requiring science to prove itself, but why would you not attempt to discern the truth using the most powerful tool in your arsenal? There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. You can't step outside of yourself so you're always limited to using your own mind.
Of course there is! Science has boundaries. It is tailored to examine the natural world. If you examine the history of science and read up on the theory of science you will notice that what is nowadays simply called 'science' was and still is but one field amongst others. The idea that because science has been so successful in examining, explaining and then predicting the field of study it has been it has to be ablke to explain everything is outright absurd.
I find the idea that not everything has an explanation to be rather far fetched, and what other ways do we have besides science of determining if our map matches the territory? And if you say, 'no not everything is explainable by science then what other system of explanation are you using and how is it coming up with its information? How do you know that information to be correct if not through the scientific method?
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I am certainly not from the US: I'm from Germany. To me literalism and young-earth creationists are, admittedly, a bunch of far-away guys, which hold weird views on what the bible is talking about. They are, also at odds with christian tradition, which always placed more importance on the spiritual message of the Bible than on it being correct on a literal level.
Well, that's not entirely fair to them. Let's say that they are at odds with your Christian tradition. It's true that Augustine didn't take everything literally, but I can find Church fathers who pretty much did.
Also, I don't think that you need to assume interference in the natrual workings of the world, if you believe in a dininity. Nor do I think that 'supernatural experiences' are needed for belief in divinity. I, personally, don't think that one needs 'gaps' in the frame of nature for God to exists. Rather, if someone believes in divinity, I'd rather expect them to not think that the divinity left 'gaps'.
Well, the problem I have here, is that if the divinity exists, but does not interfere, then pretty much by definition, I have no reason to think the divinity exists. Being a giant fan of free speech and free thought, I will never say that someone should not be free to believe anyway, I just find that the application of Occam's Razor excises God rather neatly.
Or, to put it another way, I try not to believe anything that I don't have enough...I don't know if I'm using the right terms here, but...observation and evidence for.
I'm sorry, I've had a stomachache/headache for much of the day, and I feel frustratingly limited in how I want to convey things.
Let's put it this way...I don't believe in the Aztec gods, because I find insufficient evidence for their existence. Now, they could exist, but, frankly, I don't adopt beliefs until they have some evidence for existence. Should I want evidence for beliefs? Well...I mean, if I don't want evidence, I can just invent my own religion here and now.
Anyhow, I indeed do claim that religion and science can co-exist. There is no necessary clash between the two. They deal with different aspects of reality: They might overlap here and there to a degree that's smaller or larger, but basically both try to make sense of reality in their own way. Optimally they are complementing each other.
I think that they can co-exist so long as religion continues to give way before science. That is to say, creationism yields before evolution, demon possession is overruled by our understanding of epilepsy, etc. But that's not what most people who are religious do. I can give you the name of a Muslim scholar who is still arguing that the Earth is flat, because that's his interpretation of the Koran.
Quite frankly, come over here to the U.S., and it's likely that your high and refined Christianity will have most people calling you an atheist. I hate to say this, but you are probably a bit spoiled living in Europe. :P
One last point: While I would agree that one shouldn't put credence to a claim that says that freindship has nothing to do with hormones and such, I would give as little credence, honestly, to someone who tells you that there is no such thing as friendship, but just chemical reactions in the brain. So, for me, this goes both ways, therefore I see no reason to ascribe a 'primacy' to science.
By "primacy", I mean, "that which has the deciding vote", or that which we hold to be true regardless of other "ways of knowing". Incidentally, I have an interest in social science, and frankly, anyone who stated that there are "only chemical reactions in the brain" would be violating the principles of science as much as any Creationist. That's a false reductionism, and science is not about that. Now, if someone were to say "the feelings of friendship are caused by the brain", that could be perfectly true, and not diminish the feeling or experience of friendship I have, at all.
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Well, that's not entirely fair to them. Let's say that they are at odds with your Christian tradition. It's true that Augustine didn't take everything literally, but I can find Church fathers who pretty much did.
Well, yes. Suffice to say, though, that they are at odds with the reasonable strand of tradition of Christianity.
Well, the problem I have here, is that if the divinity exists, but does not interfere, then pretty much by definition, I have no reason to think the divinity exists. Being a giant fan of free speech and free thought, I will never say that someone should not be free to believe anyway, I just find that the application of Occam's Razor excises God rather neatly.
Or, to put it another way, I try not to believe anything that I don't have enough...I don't know if I'm using the right terms here, but...observation and evidence for.
I'm sorry, I've had a stomachache/headache for much of the day, and I feel frustratingly limited in how I want to convey things.
Let's put it this way...I don't believe in the Aztec gods, because I find insufficient evidence for their existence. Now, they could exist, but, frankly, I don't adopt beliefs until they have some evidence for existence. Should I want evidence for beliefs? Well...I mean, if I don't want evidence, I can just invent my own religion here and now.
Well, I stand with my claim that God doesn't need to 'do' anything, much less 'interfere' to not be superfluos. An easy 'quick and dirty' example would for exaqmple be to say that 'God guarantees the uniformity of nature' or to say that 'God is the reason that there is something rather than nothing'.
I think that they can co-exist so long as religion continues to give way before science. That is to say, creationism yields before evolution, demon possession is overruled by our understanding of epilepsy, etc. But that's not what most people who are religious do. I can give you the name of a Muslim scholar who is still arguing that the Earth is flat, because that's his interpretation of the Koran.
Quite frankly, come over here to the U.S., and it's likely that your high and refined Christianity will have most people calling you an atheist. I hate to say this, but you are probably a bit spoiled living in Europe. :P
Well, the pope accepts evolution and knows about epilepsy. ;P If I am spoiled by living in Europe, perhaps you have been ruined by living in the US?
By "primacy", I mean, "that which has the deciding vote", or that which we hold to be true regardless of other "ways of knowing". Incidentally, I have an interest in social science, and frankly, anyone who stated that there are "only chemical reactions in the brain" would be violating the principles of science as much as any Creationist. That's a false reductionism, and science is not about that. Now, if someone were to say "the feelings of friendship are caused by the brain", that could be perfectly true, and not diminish the feeling or experience of friendship I have, at all.
Well, that's interesting. What is your take on the humanities (with the execption of religious studies). How do they figure into the 'big picture' in your opinion?
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Well, yes. Suffice to say, though, that they are at odds with the reasonable strand of tradition of Christianity.
Don't be too sure. The Catholic church burned witches and heretics only four hundred years ago. Christians still are, in Nigeria.
Well, I stand with my claim that God doesn't need to 'do' anything, much less 'interfere' to not be superfluos. An easy 'quick and dirty' example would for exaqmple be to say that 'God guarantees the uniformity of nature' or to say that 'God is the reason that there is something rather than nothing'.
Yes, but how do you know that God guarantees the uniformity of nature? Maybe nature is just like this. Or maybe there are naturalistic reasons we haven't discovered. Maybe "nothing" is unstable, and the reason we have something is because of that. Maybe one day we will have "nothingness" drives, where the instability of nothingness allows for an energy source. Don't you want to know? As in, know, with evidence and experiment?
Well, the pope accepts evolution and knows about epilepsy. ;P If I am spoiled by living in Europe, perhaps you have been ruined by living in the US?
Mmm, sorry. Let me explain the idiom: it means that you have it really good, not that you are rotten. :P And, if you are living in Germany, you do. Over here, people want to teach Creationism in schools - public schools - and at least one pastor has suggested putting atheists on an offender list, similar to our sex-offender list.
Well, that's interesting. What is your take on the humanities (with the execption of religious studies). How do they figure into the 'big picture' in your opinion?
I think that the humanities, when properly done, are the study and celebration of what it is to be human. Our hopes, our fears, our dreams, and our failings. That's a wide definition, but it's a wide field. I think that everything can be reduced, in a certain sense, to science. But I have a wider definition of science, perhaps. It's true that sorrow is a chemical reaction in the brain. But it's also true that I can feel sorrow when reading a good poem. Observationally, I can see that this holds true for others, and that I have a connection to them. To me, science is all we observe and try to honestly integrate into a unified field of our observations, and, in the end, this includes the humanities.
I'm sorry, I'm really not in a physical state to respond well. But I've tried. :)
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Just FYI Mithra, one of the reasons you might sometimes find resistance from american non believers here is because for the most part the main American branches of Christianity have a particular history of anti-intellectualism, racism, homophobia, intrusion into politics, and a continued effort to establish essentially an American Taliban fundamentalist state. I'm not exaggerating, the way our government is structured there are elected officials holding the sorts of anachronistic views that would be a barrier to entry in parts of Europe.
You can hold rediculous opinions about rape, homosexuals, minorities, keeping women in their proper place, etc and not be laughed out of town, but freely elected into the national law making legislature
Being an open athiest in some parts of this country is for the most part very, very frowned upon.
Now you aren't that sort of person at all, but I hope you can understand why you might get a more.vocal response from non believers. Here in the states they want us to not exist.
Also can we get a mod split for the surprisingly civil religious debate off from the men's rights whatever stuff?
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Just FYI Mithra, one of the reasons you might sometimes find resistance from american non believers here is because for the most part the main American branches of Christianity have a particular history of anti-intellectualism, racism, homophobia, intrusion into politics, and a continued effort to establish essentially an American Taliban fundamentalist state. I'm not exaggerating, the way our government is structured there are elected officials holding the sorts of anachronistic views that would be a barrier to entry in parts of Europe.
You can hold rediculous opinions about rape, homosexuals, minorities, keeping women in their proper place, etc and not be laughed out of town, but freely elected into the national law making legislature
Being an open athiest in some parts of this country is for the most part very, very frowned upon.
Now you aren't that sort of person at all, but I hope you can understand why you might get a more.vocal response from non believers. Here in the states they want us to not exist.
Silas, I lub you. :P
Anyway, seriously, this. I'll be honest - I don't "feel" for a lot of these things. I could live in a Christian theocracy - by Christian standards, I'm more moral than most Christians. But I don't want to. I oppose the theocrats because it's wrong (well, irrational) to use a religion as a means for determining public policy.
That's not necessarily why I oppose ALL belief, but, trust me, I'd much rather have Christians of Mithra's stripe all around me than the ones I do have. Hell, I'm not sure I'd even be an anti-theist if everyone around me was adhering to Mithra's sort of religion.
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Still loling at that tbh (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32316603)
Being more serious though, I think there is indeed a very big gap between all the american branches that i'm not myself even sure if they still belong to Christianity or Protestantism... Or the Reformed Church ? I am honestly clueless about those.
But they surely do not sound and look very much like what we have in Europe under papal law, and even less similar to protestant temples and entities. I may not be very fond IRL of monotheistic religions (the most intolerant and invasive of all religions imo), but I can agree that the orthodox Catholic Church, the Protestant Church and even the Islamic institutions we got around are perfectly moderated and definitely far from nut-jobs like the Westboro...
But I still have a huge issue when religion starts to get mixed up with ethics. Invoking God to justify ethics, as much as believers may have perfectly valid or at least, opinions they have the freedom to have, I can't accept to have a discussion if they start to introduce God into the equation.
Also Nico, while I definitely agree with your views on science vs ethics, I am still struggling with the concept of objective ethics as well to be honest. I guess that's where belief starts to get into the equation, and the same way I don't believe in any divinity, I don't believe either in objective ethics. I may believe in things like objective truths and facts, but let's face it, we will not live even long enough to see that someday, if that is even possible to begin with...
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Heya.
Now... first, Vikarion, I'm quite sympathetic to your wide definition of science. Over here in Germany, we have "Wissenschaft" which includes both science and all humanities (thought there is sometimes debate about whether it includes theology or not). Wissenschaft, or science is then not limited to the experimental method. Introspection, as observation of your inner emotional and thought processes, is then, for example, a valid source of data for 'science in a wide sense'. Mathematical theorems and formulas, which are obtained by logical dreivations based on axiomatic systems, rather than the combination of empirical observation and logical reasoning are then easily seen as 'scientific in the wide sense'. Explanations are then testable by other things then experiments. For example reasoned argument.
Yet we have a - I think - strong current in Germany, which aims at narrowing the term 'Wissenschaft' down to meaning exclusively 'Naturwissenschaft', that is 'science in a wide sense' they want to supplant with 'science in a narrow sense', like 'science' has been used - at least according to the sources I read - in the anglophone world to mean primarily the natrual, 'exact' sciences. But the don't want to keep the 'humanities' to complement 'science in the narrow sense'.
They do so because they are opposed to the humanities, don't accept their value, don't accept that they produce knoweldge and generally uphold a - strong! - primacy of the 'scientific method': One where all other modes of producing knowledge are not only inferior, but also invalid.
As most of those people are biologists (in the wake of most prominently Dawkins, but also Hitchens, Dennet and Harris - or scientific 'laity', for the matter), I had to suffer through this a lot (approximately one half) of my studies at University (which I did in biology and philosophy). And while this might sound 'spoiled', this is where I encountered the worst discrimination I actually ever directly encountered: A professor telling me in a small discussion about Dawkins' 'God delusion' that she will never, ever take in religious people for a PhD, because religious people can't possibly be scientists.
So, as a philosopher, I'm more interested, really, in problems, then solutions and I like to make things more complicated, rather than simplyfing them. Of course, as a biologist and natural scientist, I'm more interested in solutions to problems and also see the value in simplifying things.
But through my studies of the theory of science I have come to the conclusion that there is no inherent value in 'evidence' and 'experiment', but that the value of the two lies in giving additional data for our faculty of reason to work with. Therefore I'm against a primacy of method (i.e. 'the scientific method'). I personally am for a primacy of reason (in a fairly broad sense of critical thinking, cognition and intellect). (And alas, you find unreasonable people all over the place. In the US they seem to be found in religion, over here I found some of the most unreasonable people I know working as scientists.)
One more thing: I'm not a Christian. I'm not baptized and nothing. I believe in a God of philosophers. I'm much in agreement with Aristotle, there, and through that alone with Thomas Aquinas. And as I am with Thomas: Yes, there hasn't always been a distictively organized movement of 'reasonable Christians'. But there always have been reasonable Christians and if you look at the history of theology, you will find an unbroken line of theologians within the Christian community who were dedicated to reason and God equally, because they saw little, if any, distinction between the two.
So, yes, 'the Catholics' haven't always been the reasonable faction, and they probably aren't quite identical with it now (as we see by the problems of Francis to get it through to his ecclesiastic machinations that it is OK to have a gay ambassador at the Vatican. But then, they oftentimes are unreasonable for political reasons, rather than religious ones, I'd claim.).
But, none the less, in Christian theology there always has been a strong current of reason: Which is no wonder, as theology - as a field of study - is the systematic and rational study of concepts of God and of the nature of religious ideas.
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I've never been so relieved to see a thread derailed into an arguement about atheism in my life.
Six pages long, and meaning few people saw a least a minute or two of the vid. Points scored for the good guys.
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I stand for equality, fairness, reason, logic, science and freedom. I hate bigotry, prejeduce, dogma and censorship. Let me explain why.
While living with my mother, my brothers and I experienced abject poverty. We were often homeless and when we had a home it was may or may not have had running water or electriticty. The food budget for the five of us was about $80 a month. Those were the good times.
The bad times were when every so often my father would decide to have a custody battle - and often win. He didn't do this because he loved his children, but because he liked to hurt my mother. If he couldn't break her bones, then he could at least use the court system to steal her children. He'd give us back eventually, but only so he'd have the pleasure of doing it again later.
Many of the non US readers here probably aren't familiar with Appalachian culture, moonshiners, the ku klux klan or southern baptist snake handlers...but let just say the bad times included things like being tortured, being forced to torture others (if we didn't do it, then the adults would and it would be much worse. Having your own gentleness used a weapon to make you hurt others is a huge head fuck), not being allowed to sleep for days while we're preached at and brainwashed etc.
I made it a life's mission to be the polar opposite of my father. I value kindness, equality and fairness but I DON'T seek those things with dogma and ideology. I use the Socratic method, reason and logic to dispassionately determine what is the best way to achieve them.
But I look around my country and I see the masses being turned against one another by fear and greed. The are being made weak by being divided along every possible axis: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, Wealth. We're taught to hate and fear the 'others' so that we let big government get bigger to protect us and then we're given a welfare check and food stamps to keep us content. The irony is the messages of hate and fear are spread under a banner of 'diversity and equality' and anyone who tries fight back with actual facts and logic gets accused of hate mongering.
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There is a Norwegian documentary that takes a close look Third wave Feminism. I've thought for a while that 3rd wave feminism now feels more like a religion, eerily similar to the sermons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwBVcsWYJd8) of my youth, that values faith more than facts and that's why I now call myself an equalist or humanist instead of a feminist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
Hjernevask (Brainwash) is a Norwegian popular science documentary series that aired on Norwegian television in 2010. The Nordic Council of Ministers closed the Nordic Gender Institute following the broadcast of Hjernevask. The question of whether the series influenced that decision is disputed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE&list=PLBgaE8_tapyjb5PPQ6xoBeovrwKqA2a-5
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Not sure exactly what you are getting at here purple. I spent many years of my youth in crushing poverty in the Appalachian Mountains
and it certainly didn't make me against feminism. If anything I would consider myself a feminist, and I am keenly aware how exactly I am treated differently being a woman.
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Not sure exactly what you are getting at here purple. I spent many years of my youth in crushing poverty in the Appalachian Mountains
and it certainly didn't make me against feminism. If anything I would consider myself a feminist, and I am keenly aware how exactly I am treated differently being a woman.
Did you bother to read my post? I hate to be pithy here, but it feels like you really missed the point. I believe believe in gender equality because of my past (or in spite of it), but 3rd wave feminism is not about gender equality. It's a new form of ignorance and bigotry.
An enlightened ideology is one open to discussion, not one that censors conversation (like Gwen tried here), denies scientific evidence or labels anyone who points out illogical dogma as 'misogynist shitlords.'
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For anyone confused by his point, it can be summarized easily by the fact that his signature has a FEE video in it.
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For anyone confused by his point, it can be summarized easily by the fact that his signature has a FEE video in it.
Ah, I hadn't noticed that...
@purple: clearly I did or else I couldn't have referenced Appalachia, I also clearly didn't see what one thing has to do with the other.
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For anyone confused by his point, it can be summarized easily by the fact that his signature has a FEE video in it.
And people should watch it just so they know what a terrible person I am.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Education
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No need for defensive sarcasm. There are countless non-profits such as FEE on every ideological side. That one just happens to be on your side. *shrug*
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[mod]Thread started out as clickbait more or less. I was pretty much decided on declaring it stillborn when it suddenly became something, then dipped only to rise in quality again. Now as it descended into baiting and sniping so I'll just put it to rest.[/mod]