Pascal's Wager depends on which god you consider, since different gods want different things from you. Pascal considered the Christian God, who rewards faith and punishes disbelief. But some equally conceivable gods don't want your belief. Twilamena, the Goddess of Skepticism and Surprise Parties, wants you to not believe in a deity, and will send you to the Boring Hell if you do. She will reward you with heaven only if you don't believe in heaven, so that heaven will be a big surprise party for everyone who gets there.
10 Likes
Hey now that’s a deity I could…oh wait damnit.
4 Likes
Well someone is being quite silly…trying to spin atheism as its own religion or belief system, LOL.
Thinking that agnosticism is a more reasoned position the atheism means you don’t really understand either, they are both equally valid conclusions to the question, is made up stuff made up?
Atheism is simply recognizing that all religions were made up by men and that all facts and evidence point to them being only that, myths. That is basic logic and doesn’t take any faith or any sort of dogma to come to this conclusion, it is called skepticism.
Not believing in something isn’t an anti belief or negative belief, that is a logic fail.
Dark isn’t a different kind of light, or an anti-light, it is the absence of light.
Atheism isn’t a different kind of religion or belief, or an anti-belief, it is the absence of such beliefs altogether.
This is the default position for everything that can be known, the burden of proof lies with people proposing something.
It is not believing stories unless there is a shred of proof that the stories have any sort of factual basis. Seems pretty obvious to me. If I started worshiping Harry Potter and tried to convince you to become a pottartarian, a sane response might be. “Why? That is a made up story, we know when it was made up and who made it up. It isn’t real, can you prove otherwise?” That would be the atheist response. “I’m not sure Harry Potter is a real person. I don’t know…” that is the agnostic response. Personally I find the atheist response to be more logical, but I also think people are free to not know, or believe in anything they choose. The nice thing about atheism is you don’t have to convert or convince anyone about anything.
5 Likes
well said.
very true.
2 Likes
I have that exact bottle Pure Cap, it is very very very very very potent, stronger then mace or pepper spray.
It is NOT for messing about with. Seriously. Even trying to smell it will cause serious pain.
Do wear gloves. Don’t touch your nose or eyes. Don’t let the pure capsicum get far enough up the glass dropper tube to touch the rubber, it eats away the rubber in no time.
A drop or two is great for adding heat to non-traditional salsa’s such as fruit only salsa’s, or boosting the heat of any dish. It really doesn’t take very much, one bottle will last years.
1 Like
Did you know that the Scoville scale is basically just the dilution ratio to pure sugar water? 1g of 500,000 Scoville extract takes 500kg of sugar water dilution before the test panel stops detecting the heat.
I like to think of the Scoville scale as a more honest version of homeopathy.
ETA on the site for Pure Cap, they have a big headline about how “Pure Cap saved my life”. I don’t think it has to do with rubbing it on sore joints, so much as someone flung their vial of it at a mugger and it broke on the ground at the mugger’s feet, subsequently incapacitating him with severe burns.
4 Likes
I did not know that. Learning that made me very happy. THANK YOU.
Also for the laugh… 
(bonus points for using the words honest and homeopathy in the same sentence. I think that people selling homeopathy justify it by using very very diluted lies.)
1 Like
The position that something cannot exist because it was devised by people has always impressed me as being silly. People make up a lot of stuff which exists, and this includes gods as much as it does anything else. Saying that something is “only” myth or metaphysics seems like a convenient denial unless one considers that other kinds of myth and metaphysics are, without much controversy, acknowledged as being very significant. Truth, beauty, freedom, and happiness are also merely metaphysical constructs devised by people.
Then again, I find belief in anything to be a crutch and a waste of time. One can undertake elaborate rituals for deities one doesn’t believe in simply to scratch an itch, just as readily as one can masturbate without the pretense of there being an imaginary partner. It is still a real experience, even if one is biologically fooling themselves.
2 Likes
That isn’t really the position though.
Humans have concocted thousands of contradictory myths, the fact that they were fabricated doesn’t make them false it just makes the probability of them being false exceedingly high. Then you apply logic. Is there evidence that would in any way indicate that they are true or factual? Is there evidence that actually contradicts them being factual? Atheists remain skeptical and follow the evidence.
The Definition of:
Made-up: invented; not true."a made-up story"synonyms:invented, fabricated, trumped up, concocted, fictitious, fictional, false, untrue, specious, spurious, bogus, apocryphal, imaginary, mythical “a made-up story”
Note: I realize that you are probably channeling some higher spiritual plane of existence that cannot concede my empirical pragmatic skepticism. I value your contributions to the discussions on these boards enough to say, cool, I’m pretty sure we don’t see things the same way here. i’m explaining them from an atheist perspective. all hail science, bringer of knowledge.
1 Like
Empiricism and mythology are entirely separate domains. Mythology can easily be “true” in social or personal contexts. My point was that this is often true enough for other people who participate in social structures (such as politics, economics, etc) which also have no underlying empirical basis. It’s like hoping to “scientifically” argue that painting isn’t real, because the content of the image was subjective. The painting itself is still demonstrably real, and it is even possible to have empirical discussions about the technique, materials, and perception of painting. Somebody who tries walking into the painting is simply a kook and not to be argued with.
Those are all connotations of “made-up”, but it is also synonymous with artifice - which is the sense in which I was using it. The fact that people devise a thing, even a concept, in no way implies that it does not exist. Conceptually, if you have a word for it - it in some sense exists. The concept might not represent what you or others suppose it does empirically, but that is a different problem. Everything is “real”, but you might not know what it really is. Even the most crackpot ideas have an empirical existence as phenomena in the brains of the people who think them.
Which relates to my point. Knowledge exists in the conceptual domain. As does religion! Ideas are “real”, it is just that they are real ideas.
Again, NO. It is like claiming that just because something was painted doesn’t make the subject depicted in the painting real. IF the painting is of something completely imaginary, and there is no evidence that the subject matter has any basis in reality, and in fact all known evidence contradicts its very existence, then there is no reason to believe that what was depicted in the painting was in fact a real tangible object aka existed.
Politics, Economics, Art, Philosophy, nothing can be separated from empirical existence. That is how we are able to experience them. We are free to interpret our own personal experiences however we choose, but that doesn’t make them true for others, that is where you cross the line from empirical to subjective.
IF that were true then everything you can conceive would exist, which nullifies the very meaning and use of existence. That view point implodes with the word non-existance or mu. In reality we are quite capable of conceiving of things that exist and things that don’t exist. imagination is a marvelous thing it is free to invent any possibility. observation is equally marvelous, it allows us to separate what is real from that is imaginary, and determine what is verifiable and repeatable.
The fact that an idea occurred, you could conceivable label the idea “real” which is rather meaningless. That still doesn’t infer that the subject of the idea is real as in exists in this tangible reality and is anything other then an idea or a figment of the imagination.
1 Like
Does Love exist?
What is the quanta of Compassion?
Is there an SI unit for Kindness?
5 Likes
I love XKCD! 
In case you were actually wanting a reply instead of just being humorous.
We experience love, it is a subjective not objective phenomena, which is why we can love someone and they can not share our experience. Same is true of compassion, it is also a completely subjective phenomena. You cannot measure or weigh them because they have no physical existence outside of our personal experience. Although it is nice to show someone you are having this experience and have them show you they are having a similar experience. 
Now kindness is an action, albeit a subjective action based on an assumption that an action will have a preconceived result.
In a way the experience of religion is similar to an emotion. You can believe it and feel it internally, but there is no objective basis in reality that makes this belief true, or any more valid then any other belief anyone might have. The experience is real, the religion is not.
2 Likes
You are taking a line of enquiry into natural realism, and hitting the wall where it turns into meta-epsitemology. That is that defining what “real” even means takes you out of tangible science and back into philosophy.
True. After I said that mythology and empiricism are separate domains, I thought to correct myself and say that they aren’t, but are still commonly treated as such. As an empiricist, is “subjectivity” even real? Wouldn’t an empirical view suggest that the mind/body split is illusory, and that ideas are themselves tangible activity of the organism? This is the trap of being a symbol-using animal with limited faculties - painting oneself into conceptual corners. Where do we then draw the line as to what cultural phenomenon is “shared” enough to be “real”? My notion of “happiness” is not subjectively real for others, but not many would doubt that I experience it.
In short, I think it is completely irrelevant whether people’s subjective states are validated as being real by anyone. Which is why I probably frustrate theists and atheists alike.
Conceiving of that which didn’t exist is the same as inventing it. Even if only in concept. But it seems to me that images of the human mind are not merely graphical, they function at a symbolic, associational level. To the deep mind, images can be a language of sorts. Does the meaning of an image as itself depend upon it functioning as a representation of something else outside? And if everything is empirical, isn’t the imaginary, like all other cognition, actually tangible? Does mapping the activity of someone’s brain as they have an idea make it more real or less real? And does the event having a relationship with some outside stimulus make it truly representational? I am not convinced that a thought about Ganesh would be any more or less real than a thought about Star Wars, or what I think I can remember about my great-grandmother, or an irrational number.
Precisely my point! But this is also true of empiricism - it does not need to have meaning to be real! Data only becomes knowledge as it is interpreted by the human mind. Even the most concrete, tangible reality is given its meaning by people only as it passes through this subjective frame of reference. So, in empirical terms, what can we speak of as being the actual content of a human cogitative machinery? Is imagination itself not a tangible process?
(sorry, I’m uncharacteristically drunk tonight, and probably getting very silly) XD
ETA: Yes, I was rambling. Sorry!
2 Likes
Well, a computer programmer could write Algorithms for Love and Kindness. Rules for why one should give it. Rules for how to react to it being given.
Biologists might explain the chemicals involved, the evolutionary value.
Psychologists could describe personality types that experience Love and Kindness in different ways.
They’re not as mysterious and mystical as we would like.
3 Likes
3 Likes
But science in service of money or politics chains it to that same old hamster wheel. A life of reason requires True Guerrilla Science.
1 Like
I don’t see how that factors into just using science to satisfy my curiosity. Money/politics/hamsterwheel results are all just byproducts of figuring out (ever more refined approximations of) the truth.
2 Likes
Science nowadays needs labs, equipment, computers, access to other smart people. Resources. Sitting under an apple tree and pondering only gets you so far.
True. But there is also no scientific reason to assume that those can’t be organized by means of other frameworks. Otherwise, the only resulting knowledge most people will recognize (or fund) is that which is either popular enough to sell, can be used to control people, or both. People are better off using science to design a society which is organized around doing science.
1 Like
