Why do you believe what you do? And how did you get to that belief?

[Nσσя'υℓ Jαииαн]

I saw a lady on TV riding a scooter with a full niqab/burkha. It was cool

 

[Pygoscelis]

How utterly patronising and Orientalist of you.

Are 'Moslem' women living in democratic states feigning virtue if they choose to wear a burkha? Have you ever asked them? Didn't think so. It's so easy to jump to a conclusion without gathering any evidence. You didn't strike me as the lazy type. Unless of course you are psychic and somehow know who is and who isn't being coerced without ever asking them.

I don't think you understood his post.

He didn't say anything about muslim women in democratic states feigning virtue. He said that since muslim women in some places are forced to feign "virtue" (by which I assume you both mean wearing the veil - which I don't find virteuous at all - but each to their own) it becomes impossible to tell them from the ones who truly are. It is a good point.

And what does "orientalist" mean? He's being chinese?

 

[Nσσя'υℓ Jαииαн]

The only way you could tell is if they tried to slowly uncover themselves or if you heard them complaining. How many have you actually heard? I'm not being sarcastic, just curious.

 

[Muezzin]

I don't think you understood his post.

He didn't say anything about muslim women in democratic states feigning virtue. He said that since muslim women in some places are forced to feign "virtue" (by which I assume you both mean wearing the veil - which I don't find virteuous at all - but each to their own) it becomes impossible to tell them from the ones who truly are. It is a good point.

But a moot one. Unless he actually asks them. I mean, it's impossible to tell which doctors are doing their jobs out of altruism rather than for the paycheck, but suspecting their virtue without actually asking them would be unfair and foolish, no? Similarly, it's hard to tell which supermodels are actually good people and which are, for lack of a better word, slags, but I don't go making assumptions even though I would have a good point.

And what does "orientalist" mean? He's being chinese?

'In the former meaning, the term Orientalism has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, it implies old-fashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. This viewpoint was most famously articulated and propagated by Edward Said in his controversial 1978 book Orientalism, which was critical of this scholarly tradition and of modern scholars including Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis.'

Clickety click

 

[Pygoscelis]

What I find most odd about this exchange is Rugged Touch going along with the idea that wering a veil is something one does due to "virtue". I figured you'd have to be a muslim (or other similar religion) to think that.

 

[Nσσя'υℓ Jαииαн]

^^How many times has that been discussed and answered for you yet you cant function what we've told you? Ok so your saying I'm forced? Had anyone Muslim woman here been forced, we'd tell you ourselves. Making assumptions without actual knowledge or proof doesnt qualify you under the category of intelligence! It doesnt matter what you think, it matters what WE think cuz we are the ones wearing it, not YOU. Flaunting yourself doesnt qualify for modesty or virtue! We have self respect for ourselves which is why we cover and dont need to degrade ourself by wearing little clothing.

 

[جوري]

^^How many times has that been discussed and answered for you yet you cant function what we've told you? Ok so your saying I'm forced? Had anyone Muslim woman here been forced, we'd tell you ourselves. Making assumptions without actual knowledge or proof doesnt qualify you under the category of intelligence! It doesnt matter what you think, it matters what WE think cuz we are the ones wearing it, not YOU. Flaunting yourself doesnt qualify for modesty or virtue! We have self respect for ourselves which is why we cover and dont need to degrade ourself by wearing little clothing.

I am not sure what his brilliant observation are based on really? what sort of research was done here? experimental? nonoperational? any trials, any control groups? any randomization.. what sort of studies were run? descriptive, analytical, none experimental designs? cohort studies? , case control studies? case series studies? prevalence surveys-- any sort of statistics to offer as evidence? it must have been that Muslim women professed this to him given his charm?? my take -- another one of his scatological studies! Muslim women choose to cover up for the same reasons that compel others not to show up to work in their underwear!

I can't imagine why such a hateful person chooses willingly, consciously and freely to be in a our midst...Must be some sort of catharsis?.. I can't imagine what would compel a normal human to keep the company of people he obviously so detests! That must be the new face of humanitarianism!

 

[Muezzin]

Yet, quite revealingly, you are unable to provide specificity for your continued hysterical claims, merely vacuous, unsubstantiated ramblings.

Upon what evidence do you base your claims about why Muslim women believe what they believe? They are merely assumptions. It seems to me you are working backwards from an assumption, attempting to find evidence to back up that assumption while discarding anything that does not fit your agenda. You might say that is religion in a nutshell, but I'm not the one trying to show off how logical I am.

Everyone can believe what they believe, for whatever reason they want. That is choice and acceptance. On the other hand, making unsabstantiated assumptions about third parties is both intellectually dishonest and rude.

 

[Pygoscelis]

^^How many times has that been discussed and answered for you yet you cant function what we've told you? Ok so your saying I'm forced? Had anyone Muslim woman here been forced, we'd tell you ourselves. Making assumptions without actual knowledge or proof doesnt qualify you under the category of intelligence! It doesnt matter what you think, it matters what WE think cuz we are the ones wearing it, not YOU. Flaunting yourself doesnt qualify for modesty or virtue! We have self respect for ourselves which is why we cover and dont need to degrade ourself by wearing little clothing.

Indeed. Some women are forced by laws, but not in this country. And I suspect most muslim women would wear it absent the law - ie they wear it by choice. In fact, that seems to follow from definition - if they didn't want to wear it they'd not be muslim. That of course doesn't make it virtueous. It just makes it something they do. What puzzles me about ruggedtouch's posts here is that he seems to be going for the "its by force" or "its virteuous" dichotomy. To any non muslim, I'd figure its neither.

 

[zoro]

It’s a daunting challenge (sometimes, it seems to be even an overwhelming challenge) to try to understand why people are religious. As Nanrei Kobori said:

God is an invention of Man. So, the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man.

Yet, the challenge needs to be tackled, the mystery needs to be solved, if ever humanity is to be able to exterminate the god meme. Consistently, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann advised:

I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.

One way to proceed is along the lines you initiated in this thread: poll religious people to try to learn about their reasons. Such an undertaking, however, needs careful design, substantial effort to obtain representative samples, and thorough analyses of collected data. In my book at www.zenofzero.net, I address some of these issues, but only superficially. Here, to suggest to you some of the major issues, I’ll mention the following points.

1. Measures must be developed both for “degree of religiosity” and “amount of influence” from different factors.

2. A complete list of possible factors is needed. Just to indicate some such factors, consider the following partial list (listed alphabetically).

Addiction, Animal-training, (seeking) Answers, (out of) Arrogance, (wanting) Assurance, (feeling) Awe, (feeling) Betrayed, (desiring to) Belittle (others), (seeking) Career-advancement, (seeking) Certainty, Childhood Conditioning, (seeking) Comfort, (seeking) Company, (seeking) Control, Cowardice, Credulity, (seeking) Customers, (fearing) Death, (lost in) Dreams, Egomania, Epilepsy, (seeking) Eternal Life, (out of) Fear, Following (leaders), Foolishness, (seeking) Friends, (out of) Frustration, (desiring) Goals, (out of) Greed, (seeking) Guidance, (out of) Guilt, (to get out of the) Gutter, (seeking) Happiness, Herd (instinct), Hero Worship, (seeking) Hope, Hypnosis, (unconstrained) Imagination, Ignorance, Indoctrination, (out of) Inquisitiveness, (lacking) Judgment, (seeking) Kinship, (desiring) Kindness, (seeking) Knowledge, (intellectual) Laziness, (out of) Loneliness, (searching for) Love, Megalomania, (seeking a) Mate, (searching for) Meaning, (out of) Misery, Narcissism, (fear of being) Ostracized, (an) Opiate, Pack (instinct), Parental-pressure, (seeking) Peace, Political (purposes), (some other) Psychosis, (seeking) Purpose, (unanswered) Questions, (sheer) Rationalization, Savagery, Schizophrenia, (seeking) Security, Selfishness, Selflessness, Socialization, (seeking) Support, (following) Tradition, (simply) Training, Tribalism, (unease caused by) Uncertainty, (to relieve) Unhappiness, (because of) Visions, (marriage or other) Vows, (out of) Weakness, (seeking) Wisdom, (living on) Wishes, Xenophobia, Yearnings (for assurance, brotherhood, comfort, development, empathy, friends, guidance, heaven, insight, justice, kindness, love,…), Zonked (out on drugs).

3. An unbiased sampling strategy needs to be designed and implemented.

4. Thorough analyses of the data should include not only analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques to identify principal components but also reanalyzes to attempt to eliminate unjustified premisses.

As an example of the fourth point, one set of premisses might identify a major principal component (or eigenvector) to be:

The Truly Religious Person. A person represented by this principal component finds that religion provides happiness, love, family support, helpful loving friends, good company, security, support, a feeling of belonging, peace of mind, comfort, serenity, social consciousness, moral guidance, and a caring community, assurance, knowledge, wisdom, purpose, goals, meaning to life, hope, eternal life…

Yet, the premisses behind such a conclusion could be challenged as follows:

Definitions of different categories, such as “happiness”, “wisdom”, and so on, are inadequate. For example, if a respondent stated that one reason for religiosity was the “happiness” that religion provided, then one analyzer could accept that reason “at face value” – while another analyzer (accounting for G.B. Shaw’s “The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality”) might have attributed the reason not to “happiness” but to “credulity”. Similarly, if a respondent stated that one of the reasons was gaining wisdom, then one analyzer might take that reason at face value – while another analyzer (accounting for the Hungarian proverb “The believer is happy; the doubter is wise”) might have identified the stated reason as evidence of foolishness, realizing that people are happy when they think they’re making progress toward their goals, even if, in reality, they’re not making progress – and even for cases in which it’s impossible to measure progress (e.g., the “well being of their immortal soul”).

In sum, then, a statistical approach seems fraught with huge difficulties.

An alternative is to seek answers (to why people are religious) not from statistical studies but from psychological studies. As the clinical neuro-psychologist Rosemary Lyndall said:

Beliefs, including religious ones, are learned, which makes atheism a normal state of affairs and religious beliefs a learned ‘abnormality’. No psychological theory is necessary to explain the causes of a normal base state. Any psychological theory of learning, attitude change, or socialization can explain the causes of religious belief.

In such an approach, substantial analyses are already available. One can even go back to statements such as by Julius Caesar that “people believe what they want to believe.” In fact, that concept is already in the word ‘belief’, itself, for as Alan Watts pointed out, ‘lief’ is Latin for ‘wish’; therefore, ‘belief’ literally means “wish to be”. Consistently, there are conclusions such as Freud’s:

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of fate (particularly as it is shown in death), and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them… While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery… If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Even some religious leaders have now come to accept such analyses. For example, consider the following statement from Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong:

People don’t realize religion is never a search for truth. Religion is a search for security. Now [i.e., currently], we have theological enterprises that try to shape truth. But the bedrock of our religion is a search for security. And that comes out of the very dawning of self-consciousness… [We] started out by naming every tree and rock and shrub and bush and river and ocean – it had a spirit. And we worked out a way of accommodating that spirit. That’s where religion starts – in a search for security in a radically insecure world.

In addition, there are, of course, some unfortunate people suffering from various mental abnormalities (including schizophrenia and epilepsy – and some such conditions seem to be stimulated by the use of hallucinatory drugs), who hear voices, have visions, etc. Examples include (but certainly aren’t restricted to) the real founders of Christianity (“Saint” Paul) and Mormonism (Sidney Rigdon). Approximately 500 years ago, Erasmus summarized it well:

To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proofs of this, first consider the fact that the very young and the very old, women and simpletons, are the people who take the greatest delight in sacred and holy things, and are therefore always found nearest the altars, led there doubtless solely by their natural instinct. Secondly, you can see how the first great founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter enemies of learning. Finally, the biggest fools of all appear to be those who have once been wholly possessed by zeal for Christian piety. They squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves on fasting, vigils, tears, toil and humiliations, scorn life and desire only death – in short, they seem to be dead to any normal feelings, as if their spirit dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else can that be but madness? And so we should not be surprised if the apostles were thought to be drunk on new wine, and Festus judged Paul to be mad.

A more modern analysis is available in the online book by Lloyd deMause entitled “The Emotional Life of Nations” (available at http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln09_psychesociety.html ):

The neurobiology of “God experiences” is well understood. They are actually temporal lobe seizures, similar to the seizures of epileptics, explaining why so many mystics experienced clear epileptic seizures. These “kindling” seizures – which have been correlated with previous serious child abuse – begin in the hippocampus and spread to the amygdalan network, transforming previous painful anoxic depressive rage feelings into what Mandell calls “ecstatic joyful rage,” with a disappearance of self boundaries so that the person is suddenly overcome with feelings of unity and love. The neurobiology of “God in the brain” is similar to the effects of drugs like cocaine and the hallucinogens, “inducing an acute loss of serotonergic regulation of temporal lobe limbic structures and releasing the affectual and cognitive processes characteristic of religious ecstasy and conversion.” Persinger describes “the release of the brain’s own opiates that can cause a narcotic high” during these God-merger experiences, producing “with a single burst in the temporal lobe, a personal conviction of truth and a sense of self-selection [that] shames any known therapy.” As Otto puts it, the mysterium tremendum of religious ecstasy “bursts in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions and leads to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport and to ecstasy… wild and demonic… and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering.” Saint Theresa tells how it felt to experience this painful ecstasy in her organ alters: “An angel pierced its spear several times through my heart, so that it penetrated to my bowels, which were extracted when the spear was withdrawn, leaving me all aflame with an immense love for God. The pain was so great that I had to groan, but the sweetness that came with this violent pain was such that I could not wish to be free of it.”

But except for such cases of mental abnormalities, it seems that the primary reason why most people believe is “simply” because they want to, just as Julius Caesar said. One then can have some sympathy both for such people and for H.L Mencken’s assessment of them:

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

Robert Pirsig said similar:

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.

Similar was echoed in a 1995 book by John Schumaker:

Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance.

Yet, Freud was optimistic about the future:

• Religion would then be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children… If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth.

• In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable.

• The greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief – at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well.

• When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

 

[Grace Seeker]

It’s a daunting challenge (sometimes, it seems to be even an overwhelming challenge) to try to understand why people are religious.



2. A complete list of possible factors is needed. Just to indicate some such factors, consider the following partial list (listed alphabetically).

Addiction, Animal-training, (seeking) Answers, (out of) Arrogance, (wanting) Assurance, (feeling) Awe, (feeling) Betrayed, (desiring to) Belittle (others), (seeking) Career-advancement, (seeking) Certainty, Childhood Conditioning, (seeking) Comfort, (seeking) Company, (seeking) Control, Cowardice, Credulity, (seeking) Customers, (fearing) Death, (lost in) Dreams, Egomania, Epilepsy, (seeking) Eternal Life, (out of) Fear, Following (leaders), Foolishness, (seeking) Friends, (out of) Frustration, (desiring) Goals, (out of) Greed, (seeking) Guidance, (out of) Guilt, (to get out of the) Gutter, (seeking) Happiness, Herd (instinct), Hero Worship, (seeking) Hope, Hypnosis, (unconstrained) Imagination, Ignorance, Indoctrination, (out of) Inquisitiveness, (lacking) Judgment, (seeking) Kinship, (desiring) Kindness, (seeking) Knowledge, (intellectual) Laziness, (out of) Loneliness, (searching for) Love, Megalomania, (seeking a) Mate, (searching for) Meaning, (out of) Misery, Narcissism, (fear of being) Ostracized, (an) Opiate, Pack (instinct), Parental-pressure, (seeking) Peace, Political (purposes), (some other) Psychosis, (seeking) Purpose, (unanswered) Questions, (sheer) Rationalization, Savagery, Schizophrenia, (seeking) Security, Selfishness, Selflessness, Socialization, (seeking) Support, (following) Tradition, (simply) Training, Tribalism, (unease caused by) Uncertainty, (to relieve) Unhappiness, (because of) Visions, (marriage or other) Vows, (out of) Weakness, (seeking) Wisdom, (living on) Wishes, Xenophobia, Yearnings (for assurance, brotherhood, comfort, development, empathy, friends, guidance, heaven, insight, justice, kindness, love,…), Zonked (out on drugs).

An alternative is to seek answers (to why people are religious) not from statistical studies but from psychological studies. As the clinical neuro-psychologist Rosemary Lyndall said:

Even some religious leaders have now come to accept such analyses. For example, consider the following statement from Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong:

People don’t realize religion is never a search for truth. Religion is a search for security. Now [i.e., currently], we have theological enterprises that try to shape truth. But the bedrock of our religion is a search for security. And that comes out of the very dawning of self-consciousness… [We] started out by naming every tree and rock and shrub and bush and river and ocean – it had a spirit. And we worked out a way of accommodating that spirit. That’s where religion starts – in a search for security in a radically insecure world.

In addition, there are, of course, some unfortunate people suffering from various mental abnormalities (including schizophrenia and epilepsy – and some such conditions seem to be stimulated by the use of hallucinatory drugs), who hear voices, have visions, etc. Examples include (but certainly aren’t restricted to) the real founders of Christianity (“Saint” Paul) and Mormonism (Sidney Rigdon). Approximately 500 years ago, Erasmus summarized it well:


But except for such cases of mental abnormalities, it seems that the primary reason why most people believe is “simply” because they want to, just as Julius Caesar said. One then can have some sympathy both for such people and for H.L Mencken’s assessment of them:

No doubt people are religious for many reasons. And as you said, your list above was not exhaustive. One reason that is glaringly absent betrays your approach -- (receiving) Revelation. You might not think it likely, and certainly many are religious for other reasons, but if one is truly looking for the truth, then to exclude this as a possible reason would be to say that one has biased ones observations to exclude it as a possibility. Such research would be flawed from the beginning for it denies the reality of that which it searches to understand the source of.

Also, there seems to be a confusing between persons of faith and people who are religious in this discussion. Some people are both, some people are neither. And quite a few people are one and not the other. To confound the issue by treating them as one and the same will certainly skew the results of your inquiry.

 

[zoro]

I agree. "Revelation" should be included in such a list, and I'll include it in a revision to the current draft of that chapter. [Although, come to think of it, it might already be included in the word "visions", e.g., "Saint" Paul's, but the word 'revelation' is better.] In any event, as you noted, I wasn't tyring to prepare a complete list, just trying to illustrate the complexity of the question -- in turn as a lead into the probably more profitable approach via psychology rather than via statistics.

 

[جوري]

It’s a daunting challenge (sometimes, it seems to be even an overwhelming challenge) to try to understand why people are religious. As Nanrei Kobori said:



Yet, the challenge needs to be tackled, the mystery needs to be solved, if ever humanity is to be able to exterminate the god meme. Consistently, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann advised:



:

What are you hoping to accomplish from this post? how can you understand the array of psychology of billions of peoples-- as they who subscribe to religion, undoubtedly run across all sorts of socio-economic conditions and geographical locations. "humanity" if I can call it that has in fact tried to exterminate the "god meme" before... and the outcome was disastrous (you can't educate people on something that you can neither prove or disprove) I'll demonstrate with this analogy
[You could potentially be suffering from a headache] you go to the hospital where a congregation would meet for morning reports and liver rounds and discussing none other but science... this is what one of these scientists would do to confirm your claim
1-"tell me about your headaches"
2-"tell me what happens during/ before and/after your headaches"
3-"when do your headaches start"
4-"how often do you get them"
5-when your headaches start how long do they last"?
6-"what causes them to start/ any time of the day"
7-"do they wake you up at night?", "what makes your headache better/worst?"
8-" can you describe the pain, dull, sharp, pulsating, pounding, pressure like"? on a scale from one to ten one being the mildest, ten being the most severe how would you rate your pain?
9-Do you notice a change in vision? do you get numbness
10-" do you feel nauseated, do you vomit" with your headaches"
Those are the ten Q's more of less that any health care professional would ask with regard to your headache... but they can neither confirm or deny your allegations. You can be in miserable pain or faking it with munchausen , and potentially fool everyone--

there are very few tests that can confirm what you are feeling or "believe" that you are feeling! How would you like it if someone decided not to believe you or respect the pain you are in, but call you deluded, run you to the psyche ward, or leave you until you end up potentially dead from a berry aneurysm? because they just can't conceive what your pain means... how do you duplicate your belief to a spectrum of scientists who simply have no way to measure what you mean?
Thankfully at least as far as medicine is concerned... no one doubts a patient, until a long review of record proves mental illness or factitious disorder!

... So why not live and let live?... you "believe" and at the very fulcrum of your belief is a zero dividing and a whole universe unravels... others believe in something beyond comprehension responsible for our being. No one is mocking you or wishes to exterminate your "zero meme" even though it doesn't make good scientific sense and is a bit ostentatious... what is your under lying psychology in trying to get more people to be Atheistic? when being like you makes no sense anymore than you being like us makes good sense to you?

peace!

 

[zoro]

Ambro:

what is your under lying psychology in trying to get more people to be Atheistic?

First, you might notice I'm agnostic, not an atheist; therefore, it would be incongrous if I were trying to "get more people to be Atheistic".

Second, the "under lying" psychology to attempt to exterminate the god meme, to get people to hold their beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence warrants, is an attempt to get more people to "get real", to shed their delusions. Thereby, for example, I expect that there would be far fewer suicide bombers.

As well, there probably would be fewer people (such as yourself) commenting on how the universe might have been formed, when they clearly know less about physics than my granddaughter.

 

[جوري]

Ambro:

First, you might notice I'm agnostic, not an atheist; therefore, it would be incongrous if I were trying to "get more people to be Atheistic"..

Ok!

Second, the "under lying" psychology to attempt to exterminate the god meme, to get people to hold their beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence warrants, is an attempt to get more people to "get real", to shed their delusions. Thereby, for example, I expect that there would be far fewer suicide bombers..

that is very interesting...reminds you of any sort of logical fallacies?

Affirming the Consequent
This fallacy takes the form of:
If x, then y.
y.
therefore: x.

Example: "People who are psychotic act in a bizarre manner. This person acts in a bizarre manner. Therefore: This person is psychotic."

Alternate example: "If this client is competent to stand trial, she will certainly know the answers to at least 80% of the questions on this standardized test. She knows the answers to 87% of the test questions. Therefore she is competent to stand trial."
http://www.kspope.com/fallacies/fallacies.php

is this some form of altruism for you? people aren't going to shed their delusions anymore than you will shed yours! for the same exact reasons that make you speak so affirmatively of your zen of zero

As well, there probably would be fewer people (such as yourself) commenting on how the universe might have been formed, when they clearly know less about physics than my granddaughter.

I am not going to get into this again with you... I have no need to defend what I know or don't -- but will say this much, if your theories were correct, which they aren't! they would be taught in conventional physics classes. And would be readily accepted by physicists with minimum exertion into abstraction --Borrowing respected theories and putting a philosophical spin on them hardly qualifies it as correct or even "reasonable". Go use your calculator and divide any number by zero let alone a zero by zero and then we can speak of who is more deluded!

peace!

 

[zoro]

Ambro:

Your knowledge of logical fallacies seems comparable to your knowledge about what’s taught in modern physics courses. If I thought it would do any good, I would steer you to a relevant chapters in my book (at www.zenofzero.net ) that deal with logical fallacies and with evidence supporting the idea that our universe was created by a symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void. But my experience with you has taught me that it would be useless. As C.W. Dalton wrote:

Believers are interested in fulfilling emotional and spiritual needs, not intellectual needs. In some cases, one might as well try to use reason on a dog. For many people God is primarily a warm feeling. How can one argue with a warm feeling? Arguing with someone who places reason below faith and [any “holy book] authority is blowing against the wind.

Further, of far greater significance than for you to learn more logic and physics is for you to learn about the harm you are doing to humanity – which in your case is all the more egregious, since you were given the opportunity to learn.

If ever you do realize how you have helped and continue to help the terrorists (by serving as an example of even an educated person who nonetheless still bases her beliefs on warm, fuzzy feelings rather than evidence), then you will need to overcome feelings of substantial shame for the harm you’ve done. In the hope that some day you will see your error, I’ll add that the way to shed your remorse will be to join in the effort to exterminate the god meme. In particular, you could be of great service by helping to extricate the poor Muslims of the world, especially the children, from the thousand-year Dark Ages imposed by their clerics.

If ever the day should come when you are prepared to face reality on its terms, rather than continue in your delusions, then you might find some of the following ideas useful to try to similarly help others. From your own experience, perhaps you’ll see that, in reality, there is a way to “argue with a warm feeling”, namely, with shame – for the harm the person’s ignorance and cowardice have caused.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. [Demosthenes, Greek orator. Third Olynthiac, sct. 19 (349 BCE)]

Sensible men no longer believe in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants. (Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, 1226 – 1284)

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. (Benjamin Franklin)

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

All… miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. (Matthew Arnold)

For my part I would as soon be descended from a baboon… as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies… treats his wives like slaves… and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. (Charles Darwin)

Faith is believing in something you know ain’t true. (Samuel Clemens alias Mark Twain)

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. (Mark Twain)

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Karl Marx)

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows. (Robert G. Ingersoll)

It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey. [Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), Individuality]

The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ [or Allah] is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called "faith." (Robert Ingersoll)

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. (Susan B. Anthony)

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. (Henri Frederic Amiel)

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. (William James, 1842-1910)

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. (George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950)

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the impossible. (H.L. Mencken)

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. (Bertrand Russell)

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. (Delos B. McKown)

Religion… comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. [Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), The Future Of An Illusion, 1927]

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice. (Clarence Darrow)

Faith is the short-circuit of reason, destroying the mind. (Ayn Rand)

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. (W. K. Clifford essay “The Ethics of Belief”)

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. (Richard Dawkins)

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb. (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene)

We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions must, in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on neither front has our conversation with one another reached an end. There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil’s masterpiece. (Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p.226)

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride; they have yielded to the perennial temptation. (Walter Lippmann)

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency. (Albert Ellis)

If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you’d see the proof of elves. (Ariex)

If God kills, lies, cheats, discriminates, and otherwise behaves in a manner that puts the Mafia to shame, that's okay, he's God. He can do whatever he wants. Anyone who adheres to this philosophy has had his sense of morality, decency, justice and humanness warped beyond recognition by the very book that is supposedly preaching the opposite. (Dennis McKinsey, newsletter Biblical Errancy)

Personal dishonesty seems to be a necessary basis for religion. That is understandable. Children are indoctrinated with a code of behavior that is instinctually impossible to follow. So they regularly violate the code and to avoid punishment cover up the violations by lying. For them, lying becomes part of their religion. (C. W. Dalton, The Right Brain and Religion)

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad”, “psychotic” or “delusional”. (Sam Harris, End of Faith)

Out of all of the sects of the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose one that their parents' belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favor, the best miracles, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in *their* religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one. (Richard Dawkins)

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist… should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an "intelligent creator" should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools. (Sunand Tryambak Joshi, Atheism: A Reader)

 

[Pygoscelis]

Hey Zoro, I tried reading your online book and didn't get very far.

You may want to consider creating a version of it without the odd narrative (conversation?) style. I'm not sure what the goal was, but as an unitiated casual passerby it just put me off.

 

[zoro]

Pygoscelis: Thank you for the feedback. As you can see from the Preface, it was originally "just" letters to my granddaughter. My wife of 48 years suggested that other teenagers might find some value in it; thus, the style. I don't expect more knowledgeable people will be able to tolerate the style -- and I know I don't have the energy or time left for a rewrite! But again, thank you.

 

[جوري]

Ambro:.

Zoro!

Your knowledge of logical fallacies seems comparable to your knowledge about what’s taught in modern physics courses. .

It is obvious to me at this stage that the fault indeed.. does lie with your person!

If I thought it would do any good, I would steer you to a relevant chapters in my book (at www.zenofzero.net ) that deal with logical fallacies and with evidence supporting the idea that our universe was created by a symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void. But my experience with you has taught me that it would be useless. .

And we both know why... at the very fulcrum of your presentation.. lies a great deal of none sense... again regardless of my own educational background which I still have no need to defend... I have in fact fwd your pamphlet to my physics professor from under grad, and he called it "poetic physics" -- but it isn't science! It isn't what is taught in the classroom... There are many books on Amazon about poetic physics... Your Zen of Zero didn't seem to make it to any section though, poetic or not! You might want to work on the basic idea again... Everything around it, is borrowed but works.. the concept on which all else rests, however, is faulty!

Further, of far greater significance than for you to learn more logic and physics is for you to learn about the harm you are doing to humanity – which in your case is all the more egregious, since you were given the opportunity to learn..

I almost forgot how the majority of Muslims all 1.8 billion of them have contributed nothing to humanity, but have indeed fallen off the turnip truck. http://www.1001inventions.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.viewSection&intSectionID=309
Thank you-- oh thank you --kind sir for starting with us.. one Muslim at a time!

If ever you do realize how you have helped and continue to help the terrorists (by serving as an example of even an educated person who nonetheless still bases her beliefs on warm, fuzzy feelings rather than evidence).

lol, I gather you didn't read the logical fallacies page at all?... let's put it this way--I suppose you can say.. I don't base my belief on your "fuzzy feelings" anymore than you do your (zen of zero)... even though again I attest that I have fwd. your pamphlet to my professor from undergrad and he called it poetic. I find it rather insulting, you being so presumptuous-- but it is ok.. where presupposed bias is involved, there is an impossibility to step away from the telescopic vision.

then you will need to overcome feelings of substantial shame for the harm you’ve done..

How much do you charge per hour? and what are your qualifications?

In the hope that some day you will see your error..

I hold the same hope that one day you'll see yours-- and I am certain your day will indeed come!

I’ll add that the way to shed your remorse will be to join in the effort to exterminate the god meme. .

say--You can be the next Enver Hoxha and shed it by yourself... I am sure you'd get your commemoration in history-- and get to kill a few people, and burn a few mosques while at it.. yipee

In particular, you could be of great service by helping to extricate the poor Muslims of the world, especially the children, from the thousand-year Dark Ages imposed by their clerics..

It was 14 centuries of enlightenment... What history book have you been reading out of? try to step outside your bubble a little.. traveling might do you some good!

If ever the day should come when you are prepared to face reality on its terms,.

I suppose that day will happen for me, the same day it happens for you!

rather than continue in your delusions,.

we can both get a two for one discount on seroquel.. but I think you need it more! religion isn't frowned upon in psychiatry ( most psychiatrists I have encountered during my rotations subscribe to a religion or another [the organized sort]) but magical thinking and wishing to exterminate others and their ideaologies actually is very alarming!

then you might find some of the following ideas useful to try to similarly help others. .

Poetry is indeed helpful and touching.. I enjoy writing a bit myself-- it is a form of free expression-- but hardly a novel concept that others hadn't already thought of, or are practicing (it is a form of art) humanity is richer because of it. on the bright side you can start your own cult though... work on fellow "agnostics" and see how well your zen of zero takes. From experience though I notice that your exaggeration vitiates your entire pamphlet.

From your own experience, perhaps you’ll see that, in reality, there is a way to “argue with a warm feeling”

Ah you just want to assert that you are confabulating now? Indeed.. no way to argue a feeling as I have demonstrated with my headache analogy. A religion is not a feeling though! And even if you were to feel a headache, scientists would still take it seriously!

namely, with shame – for the harm the person’s ignorance and cowardice have caused.

so how is that working out for you now? -- seems your whole theme here is nothing but emotions... in fact bordering a bit on Schizotypal...
as you seem to satisfy a few of the criterion of that disorder-- on the bright side, there is always help when you decide to seek it... a Night mare though, if your local psychiatrist happens to be a Muslim ;D
peace

 

[PSmuslim]

Assalaamualaikum,

I have the same belief as my parents have, alhamdulillah. But the reason why I'm still muslim, isn't because my family members are muslims. I've learned recently much about the religion alhamdulillah, and no doubt that islam has been the right choice, alhamdulillah.