You understand the reality of the divine sophia because you feel her speaking to your soul, not because some theologian reasoned her into existence.
You understand the hypostasis of the archons because they rule this befouled earth and you see their handiwork every day through their minions, who control for the sake of control.
the empire never ended
Oh no! Your exception making has caused irreverence to become a religion! Send me all of your money and Iâll fart into a roasted turkey and blame it on the Prime Minister.
For me it comes down to being a logical positivist. The burden of the existence of a thing falls on there being some evidence for it. Thereâs an unlimited number of things I canât disprove, but they deserve no more consideration than anything else with zero evidence. I reserve skeptic for things for which there is some evidence but not conclusive proof.
Regardless, I certainly donât seriously entertain the existence of the mythical deities humans have come up with by projecting their own psychology onto nature (encompassing everything from monotheism to animism). As such, itâs simpler just to use the term atheist, because the theĂł their talking about is clearly a projection that would have so little bearing on the nature of any actual deity as to be a completely different kind of entity.
I wasnât necessarily looking for a hyperlink to the quote, but rather proof that an evangelical atheist is worse than an evangelical Christian. I couldnât tell if the quotation marks meant you were distancing yourself from the statement and using it in jest, or if you agree with the statement.
This is a completely and provably false statement.
I am religious, and like many others my religion makes zero claims that can be disproven by science. It is completely compatible with the scientific method. However; hmmm⌠are you familiar with the work of Descartes and Zuse? All your senses are provably unreliable, so you are basing all your epistemology on a faith - an untestable conjecture - that what you perceive is not merely illusory, a mere hologram. Everything past ergo cogito sum is no more provable than the flying spaghetti monster. The scientific method is how we know this.
That being said, I choose to believe that objective reality does exist, and that you arenât merely a dream in my head, and from that basis I can prove the existence of the divine.
People get used to arguing with Christians and forget that there are older and deeper faiths that arenât in any way incompatible with science.
Interesting, but youâll probably need to take that up with HuxleyâŚ
If you are going to get all pedantic you probably shouldnât make universal statements you canât prove. If we agree to eschew nihilism, then statement is generally true, because the vast majority of religions and religious people on the planet do make statements of fact about the way the world works and about the nature of god.
There certainly can be religious that are so vague as to make few if any claims about the way the world works, but then they are diffused into a murk of not terribly useful mystery.
Prove to me that Iâve done so and Iâll retract it. Because thatâs what I do - itâs part of my religion. I donât take things on faith, because thereâs no need to.
I honestly donât think you can prove that either of us exists, if you are going to insist that religion and science are dueling, incompatible systems.
As I said, if we eschew nihilism, then we can talk. Otherwise you are free to argue with yourself as to whether you are just a brain in a box.
Between religion and science, only science has objective truth testing mechanisms. Name me one thing your religion has objectively proved or disproved.
You understand the reality of the divine spaghettified one when your feel hirs noodles tickling your feet, not because some satirist reasoned hir into existence.
Ditto, basically.
(wandering on a tangent)
Before I went full neuroscientist, I spent a fair bit of time as a philosophy of science guy. Inevitably, the demarcation problem (âhow do you define the difference between science and not-science?â) got a lot of attention.
There have been many failed attempts at solving the demarcation problem. Popper was first, coming up with a solution typical of a philosophising physicist: simple, elegant and wrong. Kuhn introduced history into the mix, but paid too much attention to the revolutions and too little to the day-to-day. Feyerabend was a counter-enlightenment trolley; Lakatos was a confused attempt to weld Popperâs elegance to Kuhnâs complexity.
Any simplistic fortune-cookie definition of the scientific method or âwhat is science?â is easily and instantly cracked by counterexamples. Science is not just one single, simple thing.
The thing that comes out of it all though, once you combine the century of theorising with the reality of history, is that Science is the Stuff That Works.
Historically, if something proves to be a sufficiently reliable method of discovering successively closer approximations of an understanding of reality, it becomes adopted into the canon of âscienceâ. The bits that donât manage that cumulative-accuracy trick to a sufficient degree stay in the humanities; some of those do still build on prior knowledge in a significant way (history, literature, etc.), some not so much.
The usefulness of the various humanities disciplines does seem to correlate fairly well with how much of the cumulative-knowledge trick they can pull off. I suspect at least some empirically-based input is required for it to happen to any significant degree; theology is not notably advantaged in this respect.
Thatâs simple enough. For example:
Religion is an effective driver for conquest.
A large organization dedicated to good morals backed by belief in an all-powerful, all-seeing god, can still be staffed at all levels by people willing to run an international pedophile exchange program. And worse.
An international pedophile exchange program is still viable even decades after discovery. (This decadeâs travel destination: South America)
Thereâs no saint like a reformed sinner.
Thereâs no sinner like a reformed saint. See above.
Sure, their scientific discoveries tend to be in the social sciences, but theyâre still valid and backed up by impeccable evidence.
Yay first ammendemnt!
cogito ergo sum strikes me as a pretty serious leap of faith, too, with a lot of unexamined assumptions implicit in every single word of it.
I dunno; IME it makes fine fuel for hallucinogenic excursions. Between LSD and DMT, Iâve seen some mind. blowing. shit*.
*Shit that dovetails pretty nicely with all the best insights of philosophy and religion, BTW. Highly recommended for anyone keen to try their hand at some psychonaut action. Be warned though; it can be heavy going.
Say hi to the machine elves for me.
Didnât meet any machine elves, but âGodââ says hi.
Not all Quakers are Christian, or even theist:
Thereâs a banana in my heart. I just look at it.
