The gig is up.

certainly will do.

Will report back my findings forthwith.

 

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Hope can be a dangerous thing. Yet when things change, and they invariably do, without hope, life is unbearable.

 

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Well Signal. May I answer your link with another?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcWum0R5KUI

 

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Free will is something to discover, and nobody else can do it for one.

 

One's own free will shouldn't be pushed onto someone else. If your freewill involves removing another's then back off.

 

I wasn't addressing that post at you, and I noted as much.


And please, don't apologize for being apologetic and don't try to come up with alternatives to support what you are actually wanting to support with the Bible.
It undermines your authority and authenticity as a religious person.

And of course employing such alternatives is dishonest to the person you are talking to.

 

If that would be possible, then it wouldn't be free will.

Will is one thing. The mind is something else. Even if the two may appear entwined.

 

No, belief in God is not a qualification for this discussion.
But what is a qualification is an understanding that God is also "something personal" and that therefore insisting on merely externalist proofs is a disqualification.

 

Believing without proof is evident, and so it must be a part of the human condition for some, whether for comfort, a continuation of influences past, or of evolutionary origin, such as a false positive causing no harm, like the supposed 'bear' turns out not to be there, but is always good to suspect, for if it is one could be a goner.

It's still a double error in thinking to still strongly go for what is invisible while also totally rejecting what really is. The only possible error left to make is to then preach it as truth.

 

Watching somebody trying to pick fights on a discussion board is a lot more interesting if the provocateur is able to produce some original ideas and if he or she argues for them with skill. Otherwise, the whole thing is just a display of attitude.

Let's look at the original post again.

Working through those 23 words --

"Belief system?" Two words and a question mark. I'm assuming that you are announcing that the idea of a 'belief system' is something that you are questioning.

"Everyone operates under a proof system, except the delusional?" That sentence is grammatically ambiguous, depending on the scope of the concluding question mark.

I'm guessing that you intend the first clause "Everyone operates under a proof system" to be a flat factual statement rather than part of a question.

"except the delusional?" That concluding clause seems to have the implication that those who don't operate under what you call a "proof system" are probably delusional.

Several of us responded to these two sentences by pointing out:

1. There's nothing wrong with beliefs. Beliefs are just cognitive states in which somebody at least implicitly affirms the truth of a proposition. It's impossible to live one's life without beliefs. There's no suggestion that beliefs must necessarily lack suitable evidence and justification. Some beliefs are extremely well-founded, while other beliefs lack any real justification at all.

I realize that there's a popular usage among laymen in which 'believe' means something like 'doesn't know what he's talking about' and where it's contrasted antithetically with the word 'know'. But in philosophical and academic usage generally, knowledge is understood to be a subset of belief. Knowledge is typically defined as 'justified true belief'.

That's why the idea of a 'belief system' is valuable and is widely used among scholars. A large part of what motivates people's behavior is precisely their system of beliefs, which may be true or false and may or may not have credible justifications. If we want to understand why people do the things that they do and say the things that they say, we have little choice but to inquire into their system of beliefs. That's just as true for scientists as it is for priests and occultists.

2. The expectation that people actually have, or that they should ideally have, a "proof system" instead of a "belief system", is simply too strong. In real life, few if any beliefs are held on the basis of logical or mathematical proofs. That's just as true for logicians, mathematicians and scientists in their non-professional lives as it is for everyone else. Most lay-people couldn't even understand a formal proof.

The suggestion that anyone who doesn't base their ideas on proofs is "delusional" is, well, delusional. That dismissive judgement would apply to the entire human race and deprive the word 'delusional' of its existing meaning and use.

Again, I suspect that the difficulty here is the use of an imprecise layman's understanding of the word 'proof' in which it kind of vaguely refers in the direction of any sort of evidence or justification, and where it's being contrasted with something like 'bullshit'.

I'll let the theists respond to that one.

 

Personal beliefs have to be collectively tested and affirmed by the scientific community before it can be accepted as fact. That is science's role, proving shit.

It is fine to have a belief. It is not fine to expect someone who doesn't believe to also accept it as fact. That is the issue here.

I don't wish for people to stop believing. Just stop talking crap I say.

 

No one has questioned my stance without relying on unproven BS. Dumbass. I am not looking for a fight. i am looking for just one believer who can justify his/her stance. Truth is no one can.

If you didn't understand the first question then why didn't you just say so?

The point in the question was that I believe that people who accept beliefs without proof are delusional. I admit it was a weighted question, and could be taken as rhetorical or not depending on the answerers decision on how to attack it. It was meant to trigger debate. Get it?

No one has succeeded in countering the premise of the thread. My context and use of words is completely acceptable. Why not just address the issues I raise instead of trying to find fault with the structure of the question?

If you have the intellectual high ground then prove it by responding.

Prove to me that an unproven belief is scientifically legitimate. If not, bog off.

They can't. THAT is the point of this thread. To remind them that they believe in something unproven, and that their stance is ridiculous.

 

Signal,

Why shoild you expect testimonies to be the same?
Ask 10 different people to describe a movie they just saw and you'll get 10 variations.

I agree.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the piece you responded to, but it sounds more of a social, psycological, issue, than an actual theistic one.

One having to justify their belief to some group of people claiming to be the standard of what it is to be human, sounds like a communist type of approach to society. In this, you are deemed deleuded if you cannot produce God to the board of directors. Once you are deemed as such your value as a human being diminishes. Dangerous stuff.

''A theist'' is ''A person''.
Every single person is different.
To judge ''theism'' on the testimony of ''some'' people, is NOT what ''theism'' is about.

If that is so, then many atheists are irrational, which flies in the face of
their claim to righteosness.


jan.

 

If a satisfactory exchange includes me allowing people to pedal their beliefs as facts to support the argument they use to take issue with my statements then no, I am not ready for that.

To allow someone this stance is to give in to BS, and insane conjecture.

NO.

Not me.

 

Lets look at the difference between the two shall we, knowledge and belief in a notion derived from Plato's philosophy has defined knowledge as justifiable true belief.
The commonality between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true and justified, with evidence for believing it's true. that is my point here. it is no longer called belief. thus it is not a belief system it is a knowledge system. You cannot make any headway within philosophy simply on belief, it has to have a knowledge base. So no amount of philosophising can ever come to a conclusion coming from a belief basis. it would be infantile to try.

They use knowledge and facts because they are founded in fact, they are no longer simply beliefs. See above.

Exactly they have knowledge of that facts exist, they don't believe they exist, they have justified knowledge.

Critical thinking by it's very nature invokes a knowledge system, it would be infantile to try to critical think with simply a belief in a thing, as anything can be believed.

You can call it belief if you wish, but if you do you will be redefining the word belief, and anybody who redefines words to suit their agenda should not be trusted.
But I prefer to call it knowledge as belief is unverified thus remains belief, but knowledge is proven belief hence why it is called knowledge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

The scientific method
1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

So I repeat "no amount of philosophising can ever come to a conclusion, when it is coming from a belief basis, it would be infantile to try."

 

Here's an outline of a proof of God's existence:

Let 'A' represent any proposition.
Let 'B' represent the proposition 'God exists'.

Premises:

1. A
2. ~A
__________

3. (A & ~A)
4. Therefore B

You can construct a totally valid proof that way. It's simply a fact of normal deductive logic that if both halves of a logical contradiction are simultaneously true, the contradiction will imply the truth any conclusion that you like. Including God's existence.

The difficulty here is going to be with making the initial premises' truth assignments T at once. But logical proofs are about unfolding logical implications and they needn't always have true premises. It's still a logically valid implication

(A & ~A) => B

Many logicians have been uneasy about this little oddity in deduction, and there are non-standard logics that try to do away with it. (Which raises a number of other important issues.) See the SEP article on 'Paraconsistent Logic' here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/

So don't say that nobody's provided a proof of God's existence. I just did.

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Shaker of salt needed on that one LOL.

 

And your proof for premise "B" is! Just saying let b=god exists, does not constitute proof at all, All it does is substitute B for god. So you've proven that "B" is another name or can be used as a substitute for the word god, so what.

So with that logic dragons, elves, orks, unicorns, the fsm, Russells teapot, etc etc etc.. are all proven to exist.
Huge fail lol, try again.

 

Why not?

Not saying that it is allright for people to expect others should believe as they do. I'd just like you to tell more about your reasoning about why it is wrong for some people to have such expectations of others.

 

I repeat: If a satisfactory exchange includes me allowing people to pedal their beliefs as facts to support the argument they use to take issue with my statements then no, I am not ready for that.