NoT really.
Just being true to logic…
Read Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, and you’ll find the literal insanity of authoritarian followers a bit easier to recognise, if not understand… they truly don’t give a flying fuck about actual reality.
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Yep.
My view is that most discussions of how we got here are illogical.
It makes no logical sense that we should even be here at all, never mind thinking and debating as to how we got here.
But yet we are.
Something happened and we appeared. That’s as far as I’ve ever got logically. Everything else supposes something illogical.
Yet we must include illogical or unfounded circumstances (unproven?) To explore and discuss what happened before we existed.
And fuck me, this seems to send some into apoplectic rage. …which I find sort of funny.
Unlikely, not illogical.
It sounds like projection to me. I have never seen or heard of this happening in the UK but I have experienced homophobia/transphobia from evangelical street preachers, as have quite a few people I have known. The worst case that I know of was one woman who had a transphobic preacher follow her around the city centre while she was doing her shopping. He tried to play the victim when he was inevitably arrested but the police weren’t having it.
I also saw this in from the wiki article
- A transgender woman named Carmen Carrera works at a diner and begins to serve a loyal customer and ultimately informs him that she used to be a man named Chris, during which the customer begins to harass her.
This is also an implausible situation. Most trans people will not feel comfortable telling anyone their old name or gender designated at birth, and certainly not in a public space. During the 1980s a lot of the tabloid press in the UK would out random trans people “in the public interest”, the victim usually ended up having to find somewhere else to live or having to change their name again. Old name is usually on the same security level as credit cards and it is still DWP policy to lock accounts of trans people, as they are considered vulnerable people.
This kind of information can be very destructive if the wrong person hears it.
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It’s also a matter of shifting definitions and categories. Most people’s very definition of a god is that it’s a supernatural entity. Theists and atheists alike hate me when I point this out. If I say, “This here is a pine tree, but it is also a god.” or “This is the universe, but it is also a god.” then I get accused of cheating by offering something which demonstrably exists, and being told to (or that I can’t) justify why I call it a god. Why should I need to? Whether or not I have gods, and even how real they may be, is entirely a matter of perspective. Somebody who scoffs at the idea or demands explanations is demonstrating that on some level, this distinction is important to them. But I prefer Siddhartha’s approach, that it hardly matters either way, and is a waste of time to argue about.
One of my favorite science fiction authors is Greg Egan, who is also a member here. In one of his early books he had, IIRC, “The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference”. Which is very much like how I see it. Sort of a religion which works the same way whether its god is real or not. People can flip out over this, with: “Then why do you need this fucking god?!? What is the point?!?” I don’t! There isn’t one! It makes absolutely no difference!
It’s like how nerds can argue about what an alien “really” looks like. Why can people recognize pictures of aliens even if they don’t exist? Someone who says: “It’s an alien - BUT I don’t believe in aliens” is only half right, because they are still buying into and using the social thought form behind it, the memetics. A more appropriate response might be something like: “It’s a depiction of a grotesque, slimy humanoid figure with bug eyes and tendrils” which is properly agnostic as to its possible origins and significance.
The conceptual trap is that people both for and against the existence of gods start from the presumption that they would know what a god actually is in the first place. Which might be itself an improbable place to start from!
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Anecdotally, I’ve found that living my life as if there aren’t any jealous and wrathful gods has worked out pretty good so far. YMMV.
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I certainly don’t hate pointing that out, it seems like a reasonable way to make sure the terms under discussion are clear. Saying something like a pine is a god without wanting any connection to the above, on the other hand, is frustrating not because it’s controversial theology but bad communication.
Words are after all defined by usage; they have no point except what you hope other people will understand by them. We all know the syllables /paɪn/ and /ɡɒd/ have no inherent meaning, but for most English speakers there is a general understanding the former refers to a type of tree or wood, and – as you may helpfully point out – the latter refers to a type of supernatural entity, whether real or not.
These can be overloaded in appropriate contexts; for instance saying I pine for the fjords instead refers to longing. But if someone is explaining how Antarctica doesn’t have trees like pines, and you claim they’re wrong because you have personally defined pine to mean the Aurora Australis, who is to stop you, trust me you will find the same annoyance.
I think this also goes for this:
[quote=“miasm, post:10, topic:67857”]
Is it in the universe?
Then it’s natural.[/quote]
Not meaning to fault miasm; this is something I’ve heard this more than once, and so there’s a certain context where it is the case. I just wanted to note there are others where it isn’t. If someone is explaining how DDT isn’t a natural part of the environment, and you insist it is because humans put it there through normal physics, all you’re doing is failing to understand a common meaning of the word.
There’s certainly some level that none of this matters:
The guy isn’t wrong, if the things themselves are all right, the words need not matter. But then I certainly wouldn’t want to try talking to him about any of them. He’s made it plain he’s not going to speak the same language as me, even if he easily could, so what would be the point?
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I don’t disagree, but what I find problematic about this is that “common usage” is often naive, in many ways. For instance, semantic drift tends to not be caused by creative use of language, but rather, ignorance of definition and grammar which become canonized. Sure, it’s “natural” that a word can have both an older, more specific meaning - as well as a newer, more popularly known meaning which means more or less the complete opposite of the older one - but I think it can hardly be said to be “optimal”, irregardless.
Something less superficial, and easier to deal with on a practical basis is that common usage is often a method and excuse for leaving concepts unexamined. In daily life, this results in people talking past each other because they use obfuscating their terms as part of their rhetoric. This takes the form of people impatiently insisting that “You know what I mean!”, rather than making the small effort to specify what they mean. The lack of clarity itself can even function as a Shibboleth for their tribe, as they swallow dog whistles and proceed to whistle Dixie backwards. I prefer the semantic approach of first defining terms crucial to our respective views and/or arguments so that we can proceed from a position of mutual understanding. It’s not some much a matter of “We all all know what this means!”, but rather, “This is what I mean when I employ this term.” It can be just that concise! But it can turn into a horrific digression when people decide that the meanings are self-evident, and that it so follows that we are arguing the words themselves rather than their meanings.
And this is entirely relevant to discussion of theist versus atheist debate! Because I encounter this constantly. Gods are indeed a nebulous concept! It’s as simple as the rat-hole of debates about defining “What is art?” everybody thinks that they know, yet the discussion often goes nowhere and degenerates into pointless bickering. The equivocation swamps the dialog. There are probably millions of concepts of gods, and not all of them are even similar. So one needs to be specific. Not unlike how a person might want to argue against a whole category of ideas, such as “paranormalism”, but to really have a meaningful debate, they are going to need to offer specific examples. It can’t be done effectively while leaving the term unpacked and generalized. It’s probably an area where the arguments against something are so obvious to the person making it, that it seems easier to take it as read than offer lots of tedious examples.
The most common problem I encounter is that of referring to “god” in terms of a singular entity, but not bothering to specify which god is even being discussed! Considering how many gods there are, doesn’t picking a specific one to describe and consider seem like an obvious place to start? There is not even any reason to assume that the different gods are even the same kinds or orders of being as each other! One person’s god might be more or less an especially powerful person, or the universe itself, or the elemental concept of fire. Even among different religions who assert that there is one and only one god, their gods are not the same as each other. Going further, even different groups who claim to have the same god by name do not necessarily associate it with the same mythology or characteristics! This larger problem of properly framing the argument to begin with is usually completely glossed over, making the the discussions more or less meaningless.
Another problem which I often point out is that even the notion of “existence” needs to be specified to a degree, because gods can easily be said to have different orders of existence in different domains of human activity. An anthropologist with a whole catalog of gods is likely to think that an astronomer looking for gods with a telescope is quite naive. People who demand that gods be demonstrated as concrete tangible organisms (for their own peculiar reasons) then don’t have any problem with organizing the rest of their life around other purely metaphysical concepts which they leave unexamined - such as happiness, love, freedom, status, progress, etc. If I told most people that their freedom was not real unless they could produce it as a tangible object, they’d probably think I was an ass! Because I was choosing to deliberately misunderstand that they are different kinds of “existence”. But that same common-sense understanding often fails when another concept such as gods are discussed, and it can be all but impossible to get people to consider it. “Sure, it’s real as some bullshit idea! But it’s not really real! You know what I mean!” Do I? So to them, metaphysical concepts aren’t real, and their personal and social lives are organized wholly around objective criteria? This I have to see!
The point tends to be that of suppressing the correlative, where arguments shift the meaning of terms in order to favor their own position, rather than understanding and properly refuting the positions of others. Instead, it dismisses others positions out of hand by refusing them definitions by which they can be understood differently. So it tends to be more a flaw of the fundamental framing of the debate, rather than whatever the positions of the participants may be.
It might seem sophomoric to some, but it avoids nonsense such as:
A: God does not exist! Because it could not have created the universe.
B: But I never said that my god created the universe…
A: So you admit that it is impossible!
Or:
A: God does not exist! Because it could not have created the universe.
B: Well, by “the universe”, I mean my subjective impression of existence. It is a sort of metaphor for how I come into being.
A: No it isn’t!
Etc, etc. Honestly, I encounter a lot of really poor argumentation from “both sides” of the debate, to what extent these camps can be said to represent real positions. What surprises me is not so much that many theists tend to be blind to their own biases and flawed reasoning, but that many atheists - often self-proclaimed People of Reason - tend to be, as well. It’s probably more a matter of people’s thinking methodologies than the subject of the debate.
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Yes yes, a chuckle is not a proof and all that. 
It’s like when Spock says something isn’t logical. Well, maybe not on the surface Mr. Spock but there is for sure a deeper understanding of the situation in which logic can be shown to have, in fact, been.
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Thinking about this some more and specifically your example, you’ve used two words that have multiple meanings. ‘Natural’ and ‘environment’. Obviously, within the context of your speech act, the meaning which you are attempting to communicate is readily understandable. And yet, divorced from the specific instance of invoking DDT (a chemical agent used by humans in farming) the fragment ‘natural part of the environment’ can be used in many other contexts to mean much different things.
Naturalism, for example. One might say that god (not the concept or the experience of such within the context of the perception-experience of a human mind but (supposed) actual, supernatural god) is not a natural part of the environment.
Well, now our meanings of natural and environment have really been thrown wide open. More context and specificity is required before we can interpret the sentence.
Of course now, by ‘natural’ and ‘environment’, I might really mean, the whole of all possible contextuality. From the vacuum state to the condensed-physics, to qualia,to philosophical schema.
And I would argue that, within the context of the joke that @kimmo made, and having read and become familiar with his rhetoric over the years, it is quite natural to suppose that the environment to which he was referring was contextuality itself. 
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If you wanna talk equivocation, ask pretty much any christian what they mean by “faith”. It takes on at least 3 different meanings depending on how they want to shift the goalposts.
For instance the rhetorical salchow of first claiming that faith is knowing something is true without any evidence. It’s all through conviction and hope. Then they proceed to christ-splain how I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, as if these are the same meaning of the word. No, I actually do have evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow, just like it has for the last 4.5billion years. Also, the earth is still rotating, so it’s going to happen.
“Faith” is grossly equivocated all the time to try and make atheists look stupid for assuming that the theists will stick to their own definition of the word, instead of picking and choosing like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
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Sheesh, ask any Christian what constitutes being a Christian and get the same result.
Do you have to go to church?
Hmmm.
Do you have to believe in god and the devil, heaven and hell?
Hmmm.
Do you have to follow the 10 commandments or practice what the bible preaches?
Hmmm.
Do you have to ascribe to even modern interpretations held by official Christian organisations?
Hmmm.
Do you have to believe in the divinity of Jesus?
Wellllll.
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Mod note: Just a reminder to stay on topic. Cheers.
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