Maybe “ real scientific discourse in the modern era” has lost its way.

Or maybe your overblown sense of self-worth is vastly out of proportion to your actual comprehension abilities.

It’s really that everyone else on this forum is wrong, not everyone else in the world. So I can answer a related question: why do I come to a forum where everyone says I’m wrong? I could go to other forums where everyone would just look puzzled. This is a place where I have found I can develop threads of ideas, through meeting opposition to them. It’s exciting, a romantic intellectual journey.

For us it's just fapping.

Ah, the in tray is full again. This is going to be fun.

Looks like it's going to be a two parter again. Say hello to Part 1.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Western atheists are heirs to a particular social movement with its own history and confronted with a particular opposition

Oh look, it's homogenising stereotype time again. Heard of Epicurus, have you? Oh wait, he was writing his works fully two hundred and fifty years before Christianity existed. A famous objection to supernatural entities is ascribed thereto. Some scholars consider that famous objection to be more correctly attributed to Carneades, again alive two centuries before Christianity existed. A succinct rendition of this objection is given below:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

It’s part of the social movement of modern atheism to grab that argument with delight, store it somewhere and trot it out as a stick to beat the opposition.

Once and for all, JayJay, stop peddling the bare face lie, that recognising the existence of carefully constructed, reasoned arguments refuting assertions about magic entities, purportedly constitutes an "ideological" exercise. Which I pointed to specifically to refute your above insinuation that modern atheism is nothing more than an exercise in bashing Christianity. It isnt. Modern atheism treats all mythology based doctrines with the same well-deserved suspicion, a suspicion that arises because supernaturalists have never supported their assertions about magic entities with real evidence. We've been waiting 5,000 years for supernaturalists to deliver the goods on this, right the way from the Ancient Sumerians, and all that supernaturalists have presented throughout that time period, has been blind assertions and apologetic fabrications. Recognising this observable fact, JayJay, isn't "atheist ideology", and many here, myself included, are becoming heartily sick and tired of your continued peddling of this blatant fabrication of yours, as though it purportedly constituted fact. It is NOT fact, JayJay, it's a blatant fabrication of yours, a fabrication you have repeatedly parroted without an atom of evidence to support it, just as supernaturalists routinely parrot assertions bereft of proper evidential support.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:which is why it’s useful to refer to them as “ex-Christian” atheists.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong ...

There are plenty of atheists who never adhered to a religion at any time in their lives. There are also atheists who adhered in the past to religious other than Christianity. But once again, you almost certainly won't let ibservable data act as an impediment to your usual business of fabrication. Which is almost certainly what is about to follow.

We have been over this before; it’s not necessary for the usefulness of the classification “ex-Christian atheists” that a particular individual change from Christianity.

Poppycock. Your fatuous and blatantly false attempt to peddle this stereotype is refuted by the real world evidence, that many atheists never adhered to a religion at any time in their lives, and many other atheists were previously adherents of religions different from Christianity. Stop trying to peddle blatant fabrications as fact, JayJay, no one here regards your fabrications as being anything other than this. What's more, we know what you're up to with this latest fabrication, namely the attempt to create a fake picture of atheists as some sort of "ideologically homogeneous" mass, a picture that IS fake not only for the reason given above, but also fake because, once again, the ONLY thing atheists have in common, is suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions. That is IT, and your blatantly specious attempt to paint this as an "ideology" is even more fake than a thirteen pound note.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Religion has been leaching out of western Christian society for many generations in a complex social process.

No kidding? Oh wait, this might have much to do with the fact that not only have supernaturalists completely failed to support any of their assertions, a level of failure that makes a pathetic contrast with the success of proper, rigorous academic disciplines, but that supernaturalists have been caught engaging in heinous, indeed crriminal behaviours, on an institutional level, behaviours that would have resulted in the usual smug, self-satisfied crowing if it had arisen from atheists. That's before we factor in the most recent and truly noxious manifestation of supernaturalism, in the form of Islamic State, who are providing more service to atheism every time they upload another beheading video to YouTube, than to any religion. I note the delicious irony of IS using Western technology to peddle their evil propaganda, whilst at the same time railing against every development of Enlightenment thought that made that technology possible. But I'm not the only one who has long since ceased expecting consistency from supernaturalists.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Atheists on this forum encourage and tolerate particular abusive styles of argument

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn, more synthetic bleating about post style. Oh wait, you were accusing me above of purportedly avoiding substance, yet here you are, resurrecting yet another tiresome whinge about style. Hypocrisy, much?

You seldom avoid substance, but you lard it with abuse.

Do you need reminding of the elementary principles in operation here again, JayJay?

I, and others here, will heap as much invective upon bad ideas as we wish. Because in the world of proper discourse, ideas are disposable entities. As a corollary of this elementary principle, you are not your ideas, a corollary that on its own blows your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water with a nuclear depth charge. We who prefer adherence to proper standards of discourse over adherence to doctrines, who by doing so, also blow your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water on a grand scale, recognise that the ideas one subscribes to can change.

Quite simply, we regard adherence to proper discoursive standards as a first step in the proper analysis of ideas, and do so on the basis of evidence that this procedure works, just in case you're tempted to erect specious apologetic fabrications about "belief" at this point. Central to those standards, is a requirement that assertions are subject to test, before a truth value is assigned thereto, courtesy of the fact that before such test, all assertions presented within the arena of discourse possess the status "truth value unknown". Again, our recognition of this elementary fact, also blows your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water on a grand scale. Also central to those standards, is a requirement that relevant information be disseminated in an honest manner. Fidelity to the known facts, fidelity to known and demonstrably working rules of deduction and inference, and fidelity to the matter of addressing what other discoursive participants actually present, as opposed to one's own fabrications with respect thereto, are again, elementary principles that we regard, on the basis of evidence that they work, as necessary. Vast swathes of your posts, on the other hand, lead inexorably to the conclusion that you regard these principles as an impediment to the imposition of hegemony for your ideology and its assertions, an impediment to be brushed aside whenever it is apologetically convenient. But I digress.

Quite simply, JayJay, we, on the basis of large bodies of relevant evidence, regard bad ideas as fit only to be destroyed, because permitting bad ideas to persist, has a habit of resulting in the destruction of human beings. It's not as if doctrine centred world views, both supernaturalist and otherwise, have failed to provide the evidence in question. As a corollary, when we see bad ideas being peddled, particularly when they are peddled in a mendacious manner, with flagrant disregard of the elementary principles of discourse, we treat those bad ideas, and any mendacity in the presentation thereof, with the scorn and derision they deserve. If you don't like this taking place, JayJay, then the answer is simple, namely, stop presenting bad ideas, and stop abusing the principles of proper discourse. Your specious attempts to place fault upon us for exposing your manifest deficiencies here, is an entirely typical exercise in discoursive duplicity, that we see routinely emanating from supernaturalists.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That helps to build the presentation of what atheist are like and what you can expect if you say boo to them.

Given the abuse we've had to endure from supernaturalists for millennia, no one here is suprised at the whingeing and bleating that emerges, now that we're no longer standing for this, and taking the fight back to supernaturalists. It's only to be expected, once we start telling supernaturalists in vigorous terms, that we're no longer going to put up with their duplicitous stereotypes, their fabrications, their outright lies and their attempts to confer untermensch status upon us, just because we don't treat sad little fairy tales as fact. Quite simply, JayJay, we're telling people like you that your nasty little party is over. To borrow a phrase that was current about the time the Civil Rights movement was active in the USA, we're no longer going to stand for being regarded as niggers.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: an ideology consists of more than not treating unsupported assertions as fact.

My central thesis, one I point to evidence to support, arising from numerous examples of real ideologies, is that this is precisely what they consist of - the treatment of one or more unsupported assertions as purportedly constituting "axioms" about the world, and that all the other aspects of the aetiology of ideologies arise from this foundation. In short, ideology is nothing more than the treatment of made up shit as being even more true than the laws of physics. Therefore, not treating unsupported assertions as fact, by definition, is the very antithesis of ideology! Do acquire some basic comprehension skills here, JayJay.

It seems to me that seeing that an ideology is maintained by people and that they invest in it

No fucking kidding? Oh wait, I was writing discourses on the aetiology of doctrine centred world views for a good long time before you arrived on the scene.

Jayjay4547 wrote:therefore a whole set of attitudes, biases, easy agreement on certain issues and calumnies about opposing ideologies are bound to be associated with it.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Nice to see you borrow from my own discourses on the subject here.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Whenever there is sustained opposition to some position held by a group, ideologies emerge.

Not quite. But of course, I'm used to quantifier abuse on the part of supernaturalists.

Whilst some people may react to a particular set of bad ideas, by erecting their own collections of unsupported assertions in response, others respond with analysis. But please, don't let this elementary fact sway you from yet more duplicitous apologetics.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That’s why I claim that atheist ideology in particular, Is much more than not treating unsupported assertions as fact.

And this is another unsupported supernaturalist assertion. Actually, it's two in one. But wait, we've already provided the substantive reasons why these assertions of yours are wrong, based upon analysis of the observable data. Except that the response we've received to this, far from supporting your "atheist ideology" fabrication, testifies to the blatantly ideological nature of YOUR position here, which you are mendaciously seeking to project upon us. But we're used to supernaturalist projection here, because it happens so often.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: What else, JayJay, is your continued insistence that scientists are purportedly allowing "ideology" to influence their output, other than a blatant, defamatory and manifestly false ad hominem? Because you have failed to provide an atom of evidence that this imaginary "ideology" even exists, let alone any evidence that it influences peer reviewed scientific papers. It's been fabrication upon fabrication from you from start to finish on this, JayJay, which is yet another reason why your posts are regarded with well-deserved scorn and derision.

It’s not defamatory to argue that scientist allow ideology to influence their output.

Yes it is. What's more, I suspect a good number of scientists, if you peddle this assertion to them, will tell you where to get off in no uncertain terms, especially those who have laboured diligently to demonstrate evidential support for their hypotheses.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Evidence that an ideology exists comes from offering evidence of its effect.

Bollocks. There does not exist this imaginary "ideology" of yours, and consequently, there are no effects. Once again, scientific hypotheses are advanced by data. That is IT. YOU are the one manifestly peddling an ideology here, JayJay, an ideology riddled with unsupported assertions, and pretending that failure to treat these unsupported assertions as fact purportedly constitutes an "ideology", when it is actually the very antithesis of an ideology.

Stop peddling manifest fabrications, JayJay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Later in this post we will get on to the issue of biological progress as an example.

Already destroyed your fatuous assertions on this subject, not to mention exposed your quote mines.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Peer review is nearly powerless to stop it because the peers share the same mind set.

Lies. Oh wait. specious notions of "progress" were once a part of biological thinking. The reason they were jettisoned, was because the evidence said that there was no such thing as "progress" in the biosphere, and indeed that the term was meaningless when applied thereto. Because the very concept of "progress" implies an externally defined and applied goal that is simply not present in the biosphere. Once again, there is NO externally applied goal, NO teleology, and NO magic entities generating this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The fact remains that no scientist, not Lovelock, nor Ward, nor Dixon, nor denialists, none of them comprehend the biological future, nor does anyone else because we are all embedded in a creative biology

Wrong. Oh wait, I'm aware of predictions about the future of the biosphere two billion years or more into the future. Predictions which include the extinction of all photosynthesising plants, for a variety of substantive reasons provided within the requisite papers. At which point, it will only be a matter of time before all multicellular eukaryotes vanish from the planet's surface.

It’s astronomers who have predicted what everyone agrees on, that the sun will not sustain life here forever

Actually, biologists have additional reasons for suggesting that photosynthesising plants will not be sustainable in the distant future. Courtesy of the fact that as the Sun starts to increase its heat output, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decrease below the point where photosynthesising plants can operate. From here, we learn the following:

During the next four billion years, the luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, resulting in a rise in the solar radiation reaching the Earth. This will cause a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals, which will cause a decrease in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In about 600 million years, the level of CO2 will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method, allowing them to persist at CO2 concentrations as low as 10 parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the demise of almost all animal life, since plants are the base of the food chain on Earth.

A relevant paper is this one:

The Life Span Of The Biosphere Revisited by Ken Caldeira & James F. Kasting, Nature, 360: 721-723 (31st December 1992) [Full paper downloadable from [url=http://www.msri.org/people/members/2008cc/Projects/Project_5B_Ice_Core_EMD/Kasting_1992_Geobiology.pdf]here[url]]

Caldeira & Kasting, 1992 wrote:A DECADE ago, Lovelock and Whitfield1 raised the question of how much longer the biosphere can survive on Earth. They pointed out that, despite the current fossil-fuel induced increase in the atmospheric CO]2 concentration, the long-term trend should be in the opposite direction: as increased solar luminosity warms the Earth, silicate rocks should weather more readily, causing atmospheric CO2 to decrease. In their model1, atmospheric CO2 falls below the critical level for C3 photosynthesis, 150 parts per million (p.p.m.), in only 100 Myr, and this is assumed to mark the demise of the biosphere as a whole. Here, we re-examine this problem using a more elaborate model that includes a more accurate treatment of the greenhouse effect of CO2 (refs 2–4), a biologically mediated weathering parameterization, and the realization that C4 photosynthesis can persist to much lower concentrations of atmospheric CO2(<10 p.p.m.)5,6. We find that a C4-plant-based biosphere could survive for at least another 0.9 Gyr to 1.5 Gyr after the present time, depending respectively on whether CO2 or temperature is the limiting factor. Within an additional 1 Gyr, Earth may lose its water to space, thereby following the path of its sister planet, Venus.

Another relevant paper is this one:

Causes And Future Timing Of Biosphere Extinction by S. Franck, C. Bounama & W. von Bloh, Biogeosciences Discussion, 2: 1665-1679 (2005) [Full paper downloadable from here]

Franck et al, 2005 wrote:Abstract

We present a minimal model for the global carbon cycle of the Earth containing the reservoirs mantle, ocean floor, continental crust, biosphere, and the kerogen, as well as the aggregated reservoir ocean and atmosphere. The model is specified by introducing three different types of biosphere: procaryotes, eucaryotes, and complex multicellular life. We find that from the Archaean to the future a procaryotic biosphere always exists. 2 Gyr ago eucaryotic life first appears. The emergence of complex multicellular life is connected with an explosive increase in biomass and a strong decrease in Cambrian global surface temperature at about 0.54 Gyr ago. In the long-term future the three types of biosphere will die out in reverse sequence of their appearance. We show that there is no evidence for an implosion-like extinction in contrast to the Cambrian explosion. The ultimate life span of the biosphere is defined by the extinction of
procaryotes in about 1.6 Gyr.

The paper begins in detail with this:

Franck et al, 2005 wrote:1. Introduction

The general basis of this paper is the long-term evolution of the global carbon cycle from the Archaean up to about 2 Gyr into the future and its consequences for the Earth’s climate and the biosphere. In particular, we investigate the influence of geosphere-biosphere interactions on the life span of the biosphere. The problem of the long-term existence of the biosphere was first discussed by astrophysicists. They analysed the increase of insolation during Sun’s evolution on the main sequence. Already in the sixties of the last century, Unsöld (1967) predicted the ultimate end of terrestrial life in about 3.5 Gyr when solar luminosity will be about 40% higher than now and temperatures at the Earth’s surface will be above the boiling-point of water. Within the framework of Earth system science (Franck et al., 2000, 2002) our planet is described as a system of certain interacting components (mantle, oceanic crust, continental lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere) that develops under increasing external forcing (increasing insolation) and changing internal forcing (decreasing spreading rate, growing continental area). Within certain limits the Earth system is able to self-regulate against changing external and internal forcing. The life span of the biosphere is related to these limits of self-regulation. Lovelock and Whitfield (1982) published the first estimations of the biosphere’s life span. According to their qualitative model, photosynthesis ceases already in about 100 Myr because the atmospheric carbon dioxide content falls below the minimum value for C3-plants (150 ppm). The first quantitative model for the long-term future of the biosphere was proposed by Caldeira and Kasting (1992). With the help of a more sensitive climate model and under the assumption of a minimum atmospheric CO2 value of 10 ppm for C4-plants, they calculated that the biosphere’s life span extends up to about 800Myr. Franck et al. (2000) developed an Earth system model that takes into account quantitatively the internal forcing by geodynamics. This effect results in a reduction of the biosphere life span from 800 Myr to 600 Myr. The biotic enhancement of weathering and its influence on the life span was investigated by Lenton and von Bloh (2001). According to their results the current biosphere should remain resilient to carbon cycle perturbation or mass extinction events for at least 800 Myr and may survive for up to 1.2 Gyr. The question of the life span of the biosphere is also connected to the question of the fate of the Earth’s ocean. Bounama et al. (2001) have shown that liquid water will be always available in the surface reservoirs as a result of internal processes. The extinction of the biosphere will not be caused by the catastrophic loss of water but by other limiting factors caused by the external forcing of increasing solar luminosity.

Later on, the paper (after an extensive discussion of the mathematical nodels used) has this:

Franck et al, 2005 wrote:In the future we can observe a further continuous decrease of biomass with the strongest decrease in the complex multicellular life. The life spans of complex multicellular life and of eucaryotes end at about 0.8Gyr and 1.3Gyr from present, respectively. In both cases the extinction is caused by reaching the upper limit of the temperature tolerance window. In contrast to the first appearance of complex multicellular life via the Cambrian explosion, its extinction proceeds more or less continuously.

The ultimate life span of the biosphere, i.e. the extinction of procaryotes, ends at about 1.6Gyr. In this case the extinction is not caused by the temperature leaving the tolerance window but by a too low atmospheric CO2 content for photosynthesis. In Fig. 2 we have plotted the time when the different life forms appear and disappear and the time interval in which perturbations may trigger the first emergence and the extinction of complex life prematurely. In the case of β3=3.6 complex multicellular life could appear in principle at 1.7Gyr ago. For β3[/sub[<3.6 complex multicellular life had to appear first before the Cambrian era. For β[sub]3>3.6 a perturbation in environmental conditions is necessary to force the appearance of complex multicellular life in the Cambrian. For β3>16 eucaryotes and complex multicellular life would appear simultaneously. Another important result is that for β3>6.38 complex multicellular life cannot appear spontaneously but only due to cooling events, because the Earth surface temperature always remains above the upper temperature tolerance of 30C for complex multicellular life.

In contrast to the Neoproterozoic, in the future there will be no bistability in the realistic part of the stability diagram (β3<5), i.e. the extinction of complex multicellular life will not proceed as an implosion (in comparison to the Cambrian explosion). Our results refine the predictions of Ward and Brownlee (2002).

The diverse causes of the future biosphere extinction can also be derived from the so-called “terrestrial life corridor” (TLCi ) for the different life forms:

TLCi := {[pCO2,Ts) | Πi [pCO2,Ts) >0 }

In Fig. 3 we 5 show the atmospheric carbon dioxide content (black line) over time from the Archaean up to the long-term future for the three types of biosphere. In the noncoloured region of Fig. 3 no biosphere may exist because of inappropriate temperature or atmospheric carbon dioxide content. The coloured domain is the cumulative TLC for the three biosphere pools in analogy to Fig. 1b. Again we can see that complex multicellular life and eucaryotes extinct in about 0.8Gyr and 1.3Gyr, respectively, because of inappropriate temperature conditions. The procaryotes extinct in about 1.6 Gyr because of achieving the minimum value for atmospheric CO2 content.

Another relevant paper is this one:

Direct Effects Of CO2 And Temperature On Silicate Weathering: Possible Implications For Climate Control by Patric V. Brady & Susan A. Carroll, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 58(7): 1853-1856 (April 1994) [Abstract available here]

Brady & Carroll, 1994 wrote:Abstract

A critical uncertainty in models of the global carbon cycle and climate is the combined effect of organic activity, temperature, and atmospheric CO2 on silicate weathering. Here we present new dissolution rates of anorthite and augite which indicate that silicate weathering in organic-rich solutions is not directly affected by soil CO2 but is very sensitive to temperature. Apparently CO2 accelerates silicate weathering indirectly by fertilizing organic activity and the production of corrosive organic acids. The weathering dependencies highlight the ability of silicate weathering to act as a global thermostat and damp out climate change, when used as input in steady-state carbon cycle and climate models.

Jayjay4547 wrote:rather as it travels along the main sequence, the sun will eventually kill everything.

That demise will happen a good long time before the main sequence ends. See above.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But so long as the biological process lasts, our experience of its behavior, like that of technological evolution, should tell us that we are powerless to predict what a later observer will identify as fascinating history.

Please tell that to the authors of the above papers.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That you don’t admit that is part of ex-Christian atheist ideology.

Bollocks. See that mathematical model contained in the Franck et al paper? That stuffs your "atheist ideology" fabrication here.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:because we are all embedded in a creative biology.

Doesn't stop biologists from doing their work does it?

It just stops biologists from erecting confident predictions of the future of life, at the time scale of evolution.

No, what makes prediction difficultis the volume of data, and the existence of multiple interaction paths within that data. None of which means that scientists aren't able to extract those multiple interaction paths from the data. Oh, but wait, a number of predictions can confidently be made, on the basis of empirical evidence. Such as the prediction that genetically isolated populations will eventually cease to be interfertile, and will therefore constitute new species. Indeed, one of my favourite papers on Cichlid fish evolution, reveals that a study of Cynotilapia afra may yield, in the future, an example of a documented speciation event in the wild, accompanied by a genetic audit trail. Indeed, since numerous papers exist in which incipient speciation events have been generated in the laboratory, biologists can confidently predict that speciation events, far from being wildly unusual events requiring magic input, are perfectly comprehensible natural processes that occur on a regular basis, whenever genetic isolation and trophic specialisation are in place. See, for example, Rhagoletis pomonella.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The same is true of our embeddedness in progressive creative technology.

And this prevents physicists and their allies from doing their work how, precisely?

I didn’t claim in any way that being embedded in an evolving technology stops physicists or their allies or anyone else, from doing their work- except where that work is confidently predicting the long term future of technological evolution.

It's really amusing, seeing you trying to use an alleged "deficit" on the part of scientists here, to erect fatuous assertions that you purportedly know better, on the basis of nothing more than the treatment of your own ideological assertions as purportedly constituting fact. Oh, by the way, you are aware that Arthur C. Clarke predicted the advent of geostationary satellites before they existed? He predicted this in 1945. The first geostationary satellite to be launched was Syncom 3, dating from 1964.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:You seem to be arguing that there is no such thing as communist ideology

Once again, JayJay, what happened to basic comprehension skills here? I asserted no such thing, as even a five year old can work out. I simply pointed out that it is not just exponents of a particular ideology that have an interest in the requisite entities. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand, JayJay?

Jayjay4547 wrote:or maybe that there is, but “highlighting social classes” isn’t part of it.

See above.

At this point, it's time to call a halt to Part 1. Part 2 follows shortly.

Welcome to Part 2.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:If so, what would be part of communist ideology, in your view? I might well agree with you.

You have to ask this, despite me telling you repeatedly? There goes your claim to discoursive competence again.

Maybe so, but I can’t work out your position.

Quelle fucking surprise. What was that I said about basic comprehension skills above?

Once again, I simply pointed out that it is not just exponents of a particular ideology that have an interest in the requisite entities. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand, JayJay?

Furthermore, given the number of times I have covered the underlying assertions of Marxism, whilst documenting the aetiology of doctrine centred world views, the fact that you don't know what those assertions are, despite my having expounded upon them frequently, testifies to your complete absence of even the most elementary level of diligence. Others here can find the requisite posts with a few mouse clicks. But since you need your homework doing for you, JayJay, the two assertions in question are:

[1] The Labour Theory of Value assertion, which asserts that the value of a commodity is exactly equal to the value of the labour required to produce it;

[2] The Surplus Value assertion, which asserts that any additional cost of a commodity is the product of capitalist exploitation of the producers thereof.

The big problem with Marxist ideology, is that the first of these assertions, the critical assertion upon which all else within the ideology is based, remains untested to this day. Not least because no one has defined a rigorous measure of 'value'. Price is a different matter, and for that matter, a different quantity. For example, the price I paid for a second hand digital camera, bears no relation to the value I place upon it, because someone else could have paid exactly the same price for it, but not bothered putting it to the use I have to document the insect fauna of my locality, and simply left it in a cupboard unused for long periods of time, save for the occasional holiday abroad. I regard that relatively low price I paid for that camera, to be pathetically inadequate as a measure of the value I place upon it, as an entomological recording tool. That camera has allowed me to do more than snap a few pretty pictures, it has allowed me to produce a thorough visual knowledge base of the local insect fauna, which now runs to something like 22,000 photographs.

Of course, that's a substantial problem with capitalist economics, namely, it concentrates upon price whilst frequently having no conception of value. But that's properly a subject for its own thread.

The big problem with Marxist ideology, is that in large part, it's nothing more than a financial religion. Of course, Marx was disturbingly prescient in pointing out the flaws inherent in capitalism, but his proposed solution was a non-solution. First, not everyone is equipped to manage even small businesses, let alone large ones, which is one of the reasons we pay the specialists who are, to do the job. The problem with capitalism is that if hands out too much largesse to the venal and ruthless, at the expense of those with less avaricious appetites, but stopping everyone from pursuing enterprise manifestly doesn't work. Of course, Marx's proposed "solution" sounded extremely persuasive to those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, particularly when they were suffering from ruthless, and in some cases, life-threatening exploitation, but instead of devising a way of rewarding ethical practice and punishing rampant piratical rapacity, Marx simply declared by fiat that the answer was to sweep the whole system away. I'm reminded at this juncture once again of the words of P. J. O'Rourke, when he said that any idiot can burn down the shit house, but it takes a skilled tradesman to install replacement plumbing. Marxist ideology is extremely appealing to lots of idiots who want to burn down the shit house, but offers bugger all coaching in the art of replacement plumbing.

I think this should be sufficientfor now, and if it isn't, then you really need to brush up on your basic comprehension.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Can you spell it out for me, in your view is there such a thing as communist ideology and if so, what exactly makes it an ideology?

See above.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: Atheist ideology is also expressed in assertions for example, that there is no progress in evolution.

This isn't an "assertion", JayJay, it's observed fact. There is NO teleology, NO externally applied goal arising from a magic sentience, nothing but "whatever works in the current environment".

When I see that word “teleology” I reach for my smelling salts because it always seems to precede some overreaching argument beyond the remit of real observers.

But that's exactly what your fellow creationists routinely assert to be in place - a teleology enforced by their imaginary magic man in the sky. Once again, there is zero evidence for any of this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:We speak familiarly of technological progress without using that word, but from observing the same system behavior that, in the longer term, has been observed from the fossil record. Fact is, the word “progress” is banished from evolution for fear that its use would encourage politically incorrect thinking amongst some.

Bollocks. It hasn't been "banished" by some decree or fiat, it's been demonstrated to be inapplicable by the data. Fucking learn this once and for all , will you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Its banishment is ideological.

Bollocks. Another fabrication on your part. Once again, it hasn't been "banished" by some decree or fiat, it's been demonstrated to be inapplicable by the data. Fucking learn this once and for all , will you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:That is quite blatant from the reason you give for denying progress in evolion.

Bollocks. Once again, what part of "the DATA says it's inapplicable" do you not understand?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: atheism highlights reason over intuition.

Calilasseia wrote: Excuse me, but every rigorous academic discipline on the planet does this. We as atheists simply accept the demonstrable success of this approach, in areas such as physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Intuition plays an important role in framing scientific hypotheses.

Calilasseia wrote: Except that without the testing therefof to see if they are in accord with the data, they aren't hypotheses, they are mere fabrications of the imagination. It's the hard work of testing that distinguishes them, along with the fact that they are framed explicitly to permit testing.

Like I said, intuition plays an important role in framing scientific hypotheses.

I'm reminded here of the old aphorism about the process being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Keep ignoring the 90% perspiration whilst peddling more apologetic fabrications, why don't you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: The basic difference between atheists and theists is that theists see themselves as embedded in a hierarchy.

Except that there's no evidence for this. Once again, the Scala Natura is a mediaeval fantasy.

The Great Chain of Being is rather a visioning of hierarchy by medieval society. The modern experience of being embedded in a creative biological system implies a kind of hierarchy; we have yet to find how to vision it.

Pick up some biology textbooks and learn how it's done.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Theists express this perception of the human condition in meditation, prayer, singing, dancing, great building and in narratives that are spiritual tools.

Oh wait, what substantive results arose from all of this? Apart from providing some men in funny hats with lucrative palaces and comfortable lifestyles? Did any of this lead, for example, to the eradication of smallpox? Oh wait, we had to wait for science for that one. Did this lead to the development of antibiotics? Oh wait, we had to wait for science for that one. Did this lead to the development of manned spaceflight? Oh wait, we had to wait for science for that one as well.

It’s fine to whoop it up for science but let’s balance what you say with, science also gave us the atom bomb.

Actually, it was politics that drove this. If the politicians hadn't authorised the spending of the vast sums of money on the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons may never have emerged. Though of course, one has to recognise that during the historical period in question, there was a very real fear that Hitler might acquire such a weapon first, given that German scientists had a massively enviable reputation for getting the job done. After all, those same German scientists developed the ancestor to the modern ICBM, and had they paired it with a working nuclear warhead, this would have given Hitler the means to turn the Nazi empire into a superpower. One warhead each on London and Moscow, and it would have been game over.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: Indeed, the very assertion that "spiritual tools" exist, is another of those unsupported assertions we've been waiting for 5,000 years for supernaturalists to support, with something other than the usual apologetic hot air. To quote the Wendy's Hamburgers advert, "where's the beef?"

Take “great building” that I cited above. The great cathedrals were spiritual tools

You're merely asserting this. Indeed, I've yet to see any evidence for anything "spiritual".

Jayjay4547 wrote:in the same sense as the cattle crush that Claire Danes used in the film about Temple Grandin, was a psychological tool.

Woefully bad analogy, but do go on ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:A particular man-made thing gave people access to a particular valued experience.

Actually, the only "experience" I have upon entering a cathedral, is to ask myself how much further we would be as a species, if we'd spent the money developing science instead of penis extensions for religion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:We can recapture some of the cathedral experience by filling a cathedral with a similar ceremony. Even in my country, with a poor copy of the great cathedrals and a ceremony in a different language, by people of a different race, some of that experience comes back.

Mass hysteria, anyone?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Poppycock. Ideologies only "live" as long as there are beings with intent, possessing the intent to carry them out.

In the same way, a biological organism only exists so long as it is made of living cells.

But, oh wait, the biosphere is littered with single celled organisms. Rather drives a tank battalion through your fatuous attempt to fabricate this bad analogy.

Even a single cell is a complex organism.

Modern ones benefiting from 3.5 billion years of evolution might be. This wasn't always the case. Oh, by the way, what about viruses?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Basically we are talking about stacked elements in a living hierarchy.

Except that the "hierarchy" isn't what you think it is. pick up some biology textbooks.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The fact that one can have loyalty towards an ideology, identifies the ideology as greater than the individual.

Wrong. It merely demonstrates that adherents treat it as such. Non-adherents don't by definition.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Farcical bullshit. And as blatant a pointer to the anti-intellectual stance of YOUR ideology as one could wish for. Indeed, every philosopher on the planet will now be pointing and laughing at your above assertion, because, wait for it, that's what philosophers have spent the best part of two and a half thousand years doing, devising rigorous formulations for the understanding of ideas. Or did you sleep through the requisite classes where this was being taught? Everything from Aristotle's syllogistic logic, through Kantian dialectic, to Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica and attempts by Wittgenstein and Heidegger to overcome the hurdle of natural language, have all been predicated on the notion that ideas can be placed in rigorous frameworks, for the illumination thereof. Your rejection of this is so lame, as to be beneath deserving of a point of view.

I don’t know that every philosopher on the planet would agree that your “rigorous formulation” of atheism is useful.

Steve Gimbel is an example of one who does. Because, wait for it, his deliberations on the subject were part of the inspiration for my doing so.

Steve Gimbel seems an interesting guy. Can you give a quote from him to support your claim? I’m not saying he didn’t, but let’s get something concrete.

Try this entire blog post. Read it in full. You can also check out his biography page [url=http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/philosophy/faculty/employee_detail.dot?empId=02000322920013381&pageTitle=Steve+Gimbel]at the University of Gettysburg[/i], where he's a tenured professor of philosophy. He has a number of published works to his credit, including works on the scientific method, Decartes and Einstein.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Or every social scientist or every historian.

Please, do point to one serious academic who doesn't think it's useful to have proper definitions of terms in place? This is going to be good.

Agreed definitions are important to any communication whether by a “serious academic” or anyone else. And there isn’t a problem with defining atheism. Doubtless any number of “serious academics” have cast their eyes over Wiki’s definition of atheism as ”the rejection of the belief that God, or any other deities, exists”

Except that as I've stated on numerous occasions, I prefer evidentially supported postulates to mere assertions. I base my definition upon evidence of what atheists actually do, not assertions about what they purportedly do.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I’m antagonistic towards atheism but I’m as content with that as an atheist. A definition needs to be commonly acceptable. You are doing something different.

No I'm not. Another of your fabrications.

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the first place you dress up your definition pretentiously as “atheism, in its rigorous formulation”

Please, spare me the cheap ad homimens, especially given your sneering tone in past posts with respect to the matter of rigour. I present that definition as rigorous, because it's based upon the observable data.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Secondly your definition isn’t the accepted usual one

Not yet. But I haven't had the opportunity to disseminate my ideas in the relevant academic realm yet.

Jayjay4547 wrote:you say atheism consists of a refusal to accept unsupported assertions as fact “.

Actually, it consists of refusing to accept a specific class of assertions as fact, namely assertions by supernaturalists that their pet mythological entities are purportedly real. And, of course, all the subsidiary assertions supernaturalists erect on top of this assertionist house of cards.

Do pay attention to the details.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Thirdly and most important, you use this definition to stifle discussion of the complex of beliefs that atheists have built up

Bullshit. The reason your above assertion is bullshit, is because atheism, treated rigorously, involves DISPENSING WITH BELIEF ITSELF. Because belief, as supernaturalists routinely demonstrate, consists of nothing more than treating unsupported assertions as fact. Those of us who take this matter seriously, reject the idea that such a fatuous proces leads to substantive knowledge, and indeed, the observable evidence once again supports this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:to make them feel comfortable with their belief

Another tiresome supernaturalist fabrication. Yawn. The whole "atheist belief" bullshit IS bullshit, for the reasons I've just provided. Because those of us who take the subject seriously, once again, DISPENSE WITH BELIEF ITSELF. We regard belief as a pathetic joke.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and contemptuous towards people who believe otherwise.

You've missed the point by several light years as per usual. What we are "contemptuous" of is belief itself. We think it's a pathetic, inadequate substitute for real knowledge, one beloved of those who are too stupid or too indolent to do the hard work of finding out how reality actually works, as opposed to the sad fairy tales about this cobbled together by assorted ignorant, superstitious, pre-scientific humans.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your “definition” is just a tool of your ideology.

Bullshit and lies. It's the product of paying attention to the relevant observable data. Your pathetic attempt to misrepresent this as "ideology" is not only fatuous, but steamingly dishonest. Quite simply, I and others here think belief is the whole fucking problem! Because it involves treating fairy tales as fact.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your image of a pantheon screechingly supporting your assertions

Except I leave these to people like you.

I don’t screech, it was you who claimed to see” every philosopher on the planet will now be pointing and laughing at your above assertion”

Which, given how fatuous that assertion was, is a reasonable observation to make.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:is interesting about group think.

It's certainly an interesting pointer to YOUR brand of groupthink, that you could misread my exposition in this manner. Once again, go back to all those seminal figures in the history of ideas that I listed, and learn where they regarded it as useful, to put in place precise definitions of terms. Indeed, you'll find several of them have written entire discourses on the traps inherent in natural language, with respect to the matter of maintaining clarity of thought. The latest figure to do this, to my knowledge at least, was Willard Van Ormand Quine, who devoted a fair amount of his textbook Methods of Logic to this very matter. An issue that becomes particularly acute, when determining which variables are connected to which quantifiers in a given formal representation of a postulate. But once again, it does not surprise me in the least, to see someone engaging in trying to pass off fabrication as fact, being snidely dismissive of such proper concerns for rigour and clarity.

I don’t suffer from group think;

Oh really? So why are you peddling a number of tiresomely familiar tropes emanating from the more recrudescently mendacious sectors of supernaturalism? Of which you "atheist ideology" fabrication is merely one?

Jayjay4547 wrote:I never try to gain a point by conjuring a bunch of people thinking like I do and jeering at people who think differently.

This presumes that your robotic parroting of duplicitous and false tropes constitutes "thought".

Once again, learn those essential principles of proper discourse. Ideas are a free-fire zone for the discoursive minigun. Those that survive the ordnance, are the ideas we consider worth retaining. Those that don't, are discarded.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

There ISN'T any "question begging" at work, this is another fabrication of yours. It's very simple. If the answer to the question "do you treat unsupported supernaturalist assertions uncritically as fact" is "no", then you're an atheist by definition. Game. Fucking. Over.

You are adding “supernaturalist” and “uncritically” into your litany.

Oh this might be because we have evidence that this is what supernaturalists do, with respect to mythological assertions -treat them uncritically as fact. Because I've never seen a supernaturalist exercise the effort to devise proper, rigorous tests for said assertions. Oh, but of course, taking account of observational data in this manner, will almost certainly be misrepresented here as "atheist ideology" yet again.

Jayjay4547 wrote:“Supernaturalist” is your polemical (ie ideological) word for theist.

Bullshit. It's based on the observable fact that such people think supernatural entities are real. That they frequently don't know what they're committing themselves to with this, and frequently can't define "supernatural" when pressed, is of course a separate issue. But none of that detracts from the observed data, namely, that there are a lot of people out there who think that supernatural magic entities are every bit as real as rocks. Trying to deny this manifestly observable data will merely leave you looking completely absurd.

I can only defend what I think

I'll forego the obvious riposte ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:which is that we live within the body of a naturalistic god; God appears to me to be Nature.

And this is where once and for all, your "atheist ideology" trope is utterly destroyed. The reason? Simple. Whilst I and others here might think your ideas are wrong, the worst you will ever face from the assorted posters here you defame with your "atheist ideology" trope, is the savaging of those ideas. Whereas, I know for a fact, that other supernaturalists will see that above explicit declaration of your ideas, and regard you not merely as being wrong, but as being a HERETIC. And we all know what happens when supernaturalists start talking about heresy, don't we? In short, JayJay, there are plenty of supernaturalists out there, who, upon reading the above words of yours, won't be content with addressing your expressed ideas - instead, they'll want to burn you at the stake. Or, in the case of Islamic State, want to subject you to a particularly brutal piece of cerebral topiary. In fact, quite a few of the more hardcore creationists in America will label you a pagan, for expressing the above idea. And we all know what they want to do to those who don't conform - if you have any doubts about this, JayJay, just look up the fascist horror that is Dominionism, a creed to which a good number of American creationist subscribe, a creed whose tenets, when you read them, should make you quake in your boots. These are people who want disobedient children stoning to death. These are people who want gay people summarily executed. These are people who think the hyper rich are entitled to treat the poor as slaves. These are people who think that if you are struck down with a serious illness, it means that their god hates you, and you deserve to die.

This, JayJay, is what "ideology" really means when taken to its logical conclusion. It means deciding that you have the power of life and death over others, because they don't conform. What's more, none are more suited to the business of deciding which human beings to round up and exterminate, than those ideologies purporting to tell adherents what a god wants them to do. In stark contrast, atheists such as myself simply want to stop these people from being in a position to turn their hideous desires into a nightmare reality. That's the difference, JayJay, we don't actually care too much what ridiculous ideas you choose to treat as fact, other than from the standpoint of exposing the absurdities contained therein, whereas quite a lot of your fellow supernaturalists, upon reading that sentence of yours above, will want to kill you. Preferably by means involving as much searing agony as they can possibly inflict. Because with those words above, JayJay, they will consider you a heretic, and as such, fit only to be exterminated. You might want to dwell on this, next time you think about peddling your tiresome and manifestly false "atheist ideology" fabrication, because unlike some of your fellow supernaturalists, we're only interested in discarding your ideas, whereas a lot of your fellow supernaturalists will want to discard you. By contrast, this is one of the reasons I and many other atheists reject ideology itself, because we're aware of the fulminating dangers it poses.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I splice that onto Christianity by saying that Nature is the hands of the Creator. That’s not part of Christian doctrine but neither do I insist on the wording; it’s enough for me that God is Great.

But that won't be enough for a lot of your fellow supernaturalists. Quite a lot of whom will come after you with the flaming pitchforks upon learning of your position. How does it feel, JayJay, knowing that you're actually safer among the atheists you sneer at and subject to ad hominems, than amongst other supernaturalists?

Jayjay4547 wrote:I deny that I am a “supernaturalist”; that word implies a belief in ghosts and ectoplasm.

Well for the purpose of this part of the discourse, and my immediately preceding paragraphs, we'll treat this term as referring generically to anyone who accepts mythological assertions as fact, even if those assertions don't necessarily involve fantastic magic entities, just so that you feel comfortable.

But, whilst providing you with this piece of largesse, you might want to take note of the fact that a lot of other supernaturalists, are supernaturalists red in tooth and claw, so to speak, fully signed up to the idea that magic entities exist, and in the more florid cases, even resurrect the ridiculous vision of the world extant in mediaeval times. These are people who hate viscerally the idea that testable natural processes can provide an explanation for anything, who want the universe and its contents to be subject to the dominion of their doctrines and the assertions contained therein, and who entertain such fatuous notions as the idea that diseases are caused by "demons". Strange as it may seem to you, with a somewhat comfortable Anglican background, there are such people about, and in America, they have money and political connections that they are using, to try and make their hideous mediaeval world view rise to an anachronistic hegemony. These people would be amongst the first to put you to death as a pagan and a heretic, for expressing the views you've expounded above, and they would take pleasure from doing this. Sordid, squalid, sadistic pleasure. Let that thought dwell for a while in your mind, JayJay, that quite a few of the people who describe themselves as "Christians", are actually Torquemada wannabees hoping to become the torturers on behalf of the theocracy that is their bizarre, outré and frankly psychotic masturbation fantasy. America is littered with these people.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And there are millions of Christians who think somewhat along my lines: the very people whose position is adjacent culturally, to that of atheists.

But as I've just explained, JayJay, you and these millions of Christians aren't the only game in town. The fun part being, of course, that I've simply described the horrors awaiting you at the hands of some of the other "Christians" currently extant. I suspect that the hatred you would experience from the assorted head-choppers of Islamic State would make even the creepy, fascist Dominionists look tame.

Jayjay4547 wrote: So your insistence on “supernaturalist” instead of “theist” is part of atheist ideology

Bullshit. See above for a comprehensive explanation.

Jayjay4547 wrote:to build the wall between your belief and adjacent ones.

Bollocks. What part of "I and others here dispense with belief itself" do you not understand?

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not quite true though, that I can only defend what I think; I also live in amity with Christian fundamentalists and I am prepared to defend their practices but as something appreciated not as what I believe.

Well some of their practices I do NOT defend in the slightest. Such as murdering doctors who work for reproductive health clinics. Or trying to pervert science education by forcing mythology into science classes. Or acting as a drag anchor on medical science for specious, fabricated reasons. When those practices have malign consequences for other human beings, not to mention society as a whole, that's when I say "stop".

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

No you didn't, you simply asserted that scientists were purportedly "unable to contemplate the future biosphere", and I provided evidence that your assertion was false. Everything else you're presenting here is more fabrication on your part. The EVIDENCE says this.

You put the word “evidence” in caps but you redacted that evidence, which was my initial point:

“We are inherently unable to comprehend the ecology of future Earth. Lovelock predicts than in a hundred years civilisation will be destroyed and only a few tribes will persist in the arctic. Others say hardly anything will be different. You probably have some partisan position on that as I do”

The evidence actually shows that I offered evidence of the range of predictions, which can’t therefore all be right.

Well first of all, you're apparently unaware that by listing those people and their disparate views, you falsified your own initial assertion.

I’m still unaware of it then.

Quelle surprise. What part of "listing people who have made predictions about a given subject matter, falsifies any assertion that people in the same group are purportedly "unable to comprehend" that subject matter, do you not understand? This is something a junior school child can work out.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I claimed that we (humanity, including scientists) can’t comprehend the ecological future

Except that your own asserted sources on the matter falsify that assertion. That's before we factor in the detailed evidence I provided of other authors, demonstrating that they comprehend the subject matter more than adequately. Your attempt to spin this as some sort of "victory" for your apologetics is lame.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and I immediately offered as evidence, that we (including scientists) make different predictions of that future.

Oh wait, how is it possible to make predictions within a subject matter that one is allegedly "unable to comprehend"? Your apologetic fabrications become more desperate with each passing moment.

Jayjay4547 wrote:On the basis of the text I quoted above in italics , I’d like you to withdraw your calumny above, that I “simply asserted” that scientists are unable to “contemplate” the future.

It isn't a "calumny", it's another observable fact. What's more, your farcical attempt on the one hand, to say that scientists are "unable to comprehend" the subject matter in question, then claim that at least some named scientists published predictions about this subject matter, is a sad joke. What's more, one of those scientists, namely Lovelock, was cited in the references of one of the papers I provided above, as having provided detailed predictions about the distant future of the biosphere, on the basis of a mathematical model that he constructed. In what fantasy parallel universe, does constructing a detailed mathematical model of a system, equal being "unable to comprehend" that system? Your apologetics on this are fatuous and lame in the extreme.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: But there's a second issue here, namely that you merely presented the statements of these people as bare assertions, without referring to any underlying reasons for those people making those statements, the implication that manifestly arises from your above statement being that these people were merely pissing in the wind, and possessed no substantive knowledge upon which to base their statements.

Nope, I pointed to the range of predictions about the future

You merely barely asserted that these predictions existed, without providing any details as to how these people generated those predictions. However, it transpires that Lovelock, as cited in the references section of one of those papers I provided above, constructed a detailed mathematical model facilitating his predictions. You never mentioned any of this, JayJay, and the mere fact that Lovelock constructed a detailed mathematical model of the future biosphere and its fate blows your assertion about being allegedly "unable to comprehend" said biosphere, out of the water with a nuclear depth charge. Others have since refined the model, as demonstrated in the papers I provided above, which also falsify on a grand scale your assertion about these people being allegedly "unable to comprehend" the biosphere. Your assertion is a sad joke, and one that your own cited sources falsifiy on a grand scale with their work.

Jayjay4547 wrote:which means, they can’t all be right. “Substantve knowledge” evidently isn’t enough to enable scientists or anyone else, to confidently predict the biological future.

Read those above papers and fuckng weep.

Jayjay4547 wrote:For the same reason, “substantive knowledge” doesn’t enable confident predictions of the technological future; these are creative systems that the observer is embedded in.

Tell that to Arthu C. Clarke.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So indeed, we are all, including scientists, pissing in the wind as regards the longer term.

Bollocks. This is another fantasy of yours.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: On the other hand, when I introduced Dixon et al, I explicitly stated that they had reasons underpinning the choices they made, based upon current known scientific fact. You implied with your above words, that none of these people possessed any substantive knowledge upon which to base their statements, which was another point I refuted by my introduction of Dixon et al, who manifestly did have substantive reasons for their choices. Which in turn refutes your "unable to comprehend the ecology of future Earth" assertion wholesale.

Dixon and Ward; two quite different people who disagreed with each other.

Except that I've already explained, in detail, that these individuals prioritised different choices from the available options. The fact that they understood these options to be available, on its own falsifies your assertion. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: In short, you were offering a disparity of views as purportedly constituting evidence of ignorance, without bothering with any detail. The moment I started supplying some of that detail, and in the process driving a tank battalion through your assertions, you resorted to the usual JayJay Apologetics MachineTM to try and dig yourself out of the hole.

I’m not in a hole

At this stage, that hole is now a fucking canyon.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I have argued consistently that scientists can’t “comprehend” (confidently predict)

Ahem, this is a later addition after the fact on your part, to try and shore up your shoddy apologetics. You never mentioned the word "predict" in your initial assertion, you asserted that these people were "unable to comprehend" the future biosphere. You do know what the word "comprehend" means, don't you, JayJay, and how its meaning is distinct from the meaning of "predict"? "Comprehend" means simply, to possess knowledge of. "Predict" means to present a statement that a given action will take place in the future, with the intention that said statement be regarded as true.

Jayjay4547 wrote:the biological future, for the same reason they can’t comprehend the technological future; both are creative systems.

Read those above papers and fucking weep, JayJay. When people construct detailed mathematical models, they most certainly comprehend the systems they are modelling.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Technological evolution follows discoveries that haven’t been made yet, about the way things can be made to work. Technological evolution is a know-how building system. So is biological evolution: it builds knowledge of how living things can be made to work.

Oh, the fact that evolution operates according to well defined algorithms, which can be modelled on computers, and indeed, used as a process for the generation of artefacts other than biological ones, is one of those inconvenient facts you're going to pretend doesn't exist, are you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s weird that you are interpreting my point as a slight on scientists for being “ignorant”.

I and others here know what you're up to JayJay, you're trying to peddle the notion that the world's evolutionary biologists, including Nobel Laureates, have somehow got it all wrong, and your fantasy assertions are somehow right. Your above statement is wholly disingenuous in the light of this observed fact.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Admittedly, compared to what mortals might know at the end of time maybe, they are ignorant. Currently scientists have less than Godlike knowledge.

We've yet to see evidence for any entity possessing this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your mistake could be called that of the scientist as misplaced observer who stands outside of time, where some have visioned God.

Word salad.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: You added Dixon and Ward, which added zilch as counterpoint.

Poppycock. It added detail, such as the fact that these individuals based their views upon known scientific fact.

DId I suggest that Lovelock, whom I cited, doesn’t base his views on known scientific fact?

You never provided any details on this matter, and indeed, it was only when I delved into the actual scientific literature, that I learned that Lovelock generated a detailed mathematical model upon which his predictions were based. You never even hinted at the existence of this. I learned this NOT from your assertions, but from peer reviewed scientific literature. So please, stop posturing as being in a position to lecture me on the subject, or for that matter, on discoursive conduct.

Jayjay4547 wrote:My point is that known scientific fact, at any particular time, isn’t adequate to comprehend the biological, or the technological systems, because these are creative, know-how building systems.

Read the above papers and fucking weep. Also, tell that to Arthur C. Clarke.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The reason why people embedded in a creative system fail to comprehend the future is because in the future, aspects of the world will be discovered that we don’t know about yet.

Tell that to the people who predicted the existence of Tiktaalik three years before it was found.

It’s the real future of a creative system that we can’t comprehend, the part that might confront us with moral decisions.

Once again, read those papers and fucking weep.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:That’is why we can’t predict the path of technological progress, and the same applies to biological progress.

Correction. It's more a function of the volume of data, and the limits upon how long it takes us to process it. Just ask those nice people at Boeing and Airbus Industries, and their supercomputer staff, and how this applies to their using the Navier-Stokes Equations to design new airliners.

Of course, in designing the next generation of any piece of technology, existing knowledge is all important. It’s when new technological developments happen, that prediction goes very awry.

Except that there are sound reasons for this happening when it does. It's called encountering a new and previously unobserved phenomenon. Which then has a habit of being integrated into our body of knowledge, once we encounter it. Nobody predicted the existence of black holes during the reign of Newtonian physics, because such objects were not considered possible within that framework (and indeed, are not possible within that framework, because that framework permits infinite velocities). We had to wait for Einstein to come along, establish a new physics, and as a corollary of so doing, provide the means for predicting the existence of black holes, which in the framework of General Relativity, are not only possible, but possess observable properties making predictions about their existence testable. Lo and behold, when astronomers started looking for them, they duly turned up.

Oh, and on the subject of technology, I'm reminded at this juncture of this little graphic:

<bitches please>

Note that Star Trek: The Next Generation, featuring Picard, first appeared on TV in 1987, a good two decades before the advent of the iPad. The earlier original series had flip up communicators used by Kirk and company, this TV series dating back to the late 1970s, and, lo and behold, those flip up communicators ended up being emulated by mobile phones, starting with a Motorola model in 1996.

Oh, while you're at it, look up Arrowsmith, a 1925 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Sinclair Lewis, in which he wrote a fictional account of bacteriophage viruses being used for therapeutic purposes. Lo and behold, the former Soviet Union made this a reality in the 1930s.

Looks like quite a few other people out there aren't as stupid as you make them out to be.

Jayjay4547 wrote:An example is a pic “A city of the future” from the 1930s, showing propeller planes and gyros flitting about landing on the flat roofs of a city recognizably similar to today’s. The invention of the jet engine changed all that: very different planes land on large airports at the edge of cities.

Oddly enough, that picture got it right with respect to helicopters, though.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: I don’t know much about Greek mythology. I have the impression that it consisted of stories about the past and they conceived a more perfect past, when ideal things had been realized.

You don't know, do you?
If you can regard the truly bizarre theogony of Greek mythology as representing some mythical ideal past, then you're reading an entirely different text from the rest of us.

I got that impression from Popper’s “The open society and its enemies” volume 1 chapter 3, writing on Plato:

”From the feeling that society, and indeed ‘everything’ , was in flux, arose the fundamental impulse of his philosophy as well as the philosophy of Heraclitus; and as his historicist predecessor had done, so Plato summed up his social experience by proffering a law of historical development. According to this law, which will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, social change was degeneration. Even though in some of Plato’s works there is a suggestion of cyclical development, leading up again after the lowest point of extreme evil was passed, the main trend is one of decay.”

Of course, you do realise that Plato's The Republic was effectively a "how to" manual for a dictatorship? Among numerous other things of course. It's one of the reasons political theorists interested in protecting democracy spend time studying it, in order to learn how to prevent the emergence of tyranny. Plus, The Republic wasn't mythology, it was philosophical and political discourse.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Not that I claimed the ancient Greeks had no concept of progress; I just posed the question: in a society with no technological progress, could they have a word for progress? You brought up the ancient Greeks.

For good reason. They invented philosophy, much of the foundations of mathematics, the current divisions of the physical sciences, the first prototype propositional logic, and in the case of their fiction, were responsible for inventing several important genres that are alive to this day, such as comedy, tragedy, and satire. Aristophanes constituted a particularly acid exponent of satire.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: Plus, the Greeks had a far more sophisticated view of their own magic entities, than anything you'll find emanating from the Middle East.

Depends on what you mean by “sophisticated”. Religions stemming from the Jewish vision competed with and displaced polytheistic religions including the Greek myths, around the Mediterranean, then Europe and much of the globe.

Aided by force.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Progress appears as a footstep journey, even Revelation isn’t about “progress”, where there is a big shindig and a victory. The discovery of the possibility of technological progress was basically a protestant movement, nurtured in the industrial cities of Britain.

Oh and of course Enlightenment thinkers had nothing to contribute to this, did they? Much. See, for example: Voltaire.

Funny how there is zero mention of the Idea Of Progress being a product of protestant religion in the Wikipedia article devoted thereto ... instead, the major contributors are listed as Enlightenment thinkers.

Enlightenment thinkers who theorized and generalized about progress weren’t exactly the discoverers of the possibility of technological progress.

I point you to Voltaire again. Who, during his exile in England as a result of the iniquities of the then extant French justice system, became passionately devoted to Newtonian physics, and indeed conducted his own empirical researches. He also devoted much effort toward the reform of that French justice system. You'll also find that Candide is a wonderfully satirical refutation of the rather silly theodicy of Leibniz, who should have stuck to mathematics and scientific disciplines, where his prodigious output is still of importance today.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Those discoverers were practical people like Charles Parsons, the inventor of the modern steam turbine, Anglo-Irish, educated at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge, worked in Newcastle.

I'll point you at Voltaire again. Who was something more than a "theorist".

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Different cultures make different contributions at particular times. I tried to make the point that the Hebrew vision of the unseen creator lent itself to a deeper concept of the human condition in a hierarchy than did polytheism, which lends itself to stories of relations between gods, which in turn puts them more at the human scale.

Except that, oh wait, the only body of text surviving from the requisite period, emanating from the Middle East, is mythology. That is it. Whereas the body of text surviving from the Greeks, includes literature, poetry, philosophical discourses, discourses on the first tentative steps into the world of the natural sciences, the first attempts at an academic treatment of history, a vast array of writing distinct from their mythology. We have nothing of this sort from the Middle East. It's as if the requisite people in the Middle East, quite simply didn't have a life outside their adherence to mythology. Yet, ironically, antecedent occupants of the same region, did leave behind literature other than mythology. Such as the legal codes of Hammurabi and Urukagina. Even the Babylonians left behind them examples of humour and satire in literature, yet the moment the authors of Leviticus start making their presence felt, nothing of this sort emanates from them.

“Nothing” emanates from who exactly? From the Jews?

Do read what I post, jayJay, before launching into the usual specious apologetic misrepresentations, based upon deliberately ignoring the facts I present, followed by quote mining my text.

Quite simply, we have NO other works emanating from this culture in this period. Absolutely nothing other than their mythology. That's all they appeared to be interested in writing. We have NO works covering philosophy outside of their narrow religious focus, NO works covering subjects such as mathematics and the physical sciences, NO secular literature of any sort. There is a vast, yawning void, that in other cultures, such as the Ancient Greeks, is filled with other things. The people who wrote Leviticus and the other frankly scary works of the Old Testament, appeared to have NO other interests in life apart from their mythology. The complete absence of any secular literature from these people, tells us something frightening. It tells us that they simply didn't have a life outside their mythology. It tells us that their mythology was an all-consuming obsession, an all-consuming obsession leading them to ignore the treasures of the physical world around them, and treat that physical world and its wonders, as something to be shunned. The evidence points to these people being obsessed with their magic man, to the point of clinical psychopathy. Whilst other cultures were developing substantial bodies of secular literature, these people were producing nothing of this sort, and instead were devoting their energies to the fabrication of a mythology that was to become a volatile, explosive doctrinal time bomb, blowing up in the faces of other civilisations for the best part of two millennia afterwards.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The disproportionate influence that Jews have today in all intellectual and practical affairs

You should be careful with such phrases, JayJay.

Oh, of course, the evidence routinely points to the fact, that those Jews who later became prominent in disciplines such as the physical sciences, were Jews who largely abandoned the religion of their ancestors. People like Einstein and Steven Weinberg.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and have had historically, suggests a significance for building one’s mindset around one’s relation with what is greater.

Einstein and Weinberg are just two examples refuting your assertion. I could probably find more if I delved through the list of Nobel Laureates.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote: Did you read that link I provided to PZ Myers' article? And the substantive scientific reasons why the scala natura is wrong?

Myers’ article was a denial of increased complexity in nature

It wasn't a "denial" of anything. Or did you fail to read the actual content? Such as that interesting discourse on the difference between insect neurodevelopment and that seen in Chordates?

Jayjay4547 wrote:which isn’t my interest in progress.

In short, you dismissed the contents summarily because they didn't conform to your ideolgical agenda. Which makes your "atheist ideology" fabrication all the more steamingly hypocritical.

Here is the link to Myer’s article again for reference
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/05/25/step-away-from-that-ladder/

I'm familiar with it. I exercised the effort to convert the entire post into a Word document for future reference.

Jayjay4547 wrote:He starts with “We’ve often heard this claim from creationists: “there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!” and the rest of his piece is wading into that claim.

Except of course, that a good number of creationists think there's a link between complexity and "progress". It's all part of the usual teleological apologetics they love so much.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But like I said, complexity is a side issue:

A good number of your fellow creationists don't think so.

Jayjay4547 wrote:progress in evolution and in technology, is rather an increase in know-how within the entire system. Complexity is at most an unreliable attribute of increased functionality by particular organisms.

Try posting that over on Dembski's blog, and see how long you last before you're summarily banned, quite possibly for blasphemy.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:And the great Chain of Being isn’t about progress either, like It was a depiction of the fixed settled state of nature.

Except of course that it's invoked frequently to imply that humans are purportedly the "pinnacle" of progress in the universe. But don't let the facts get in the way of your revisionism.

We are the pinnacle of evolution, if evolution has been the creation of biological know-how.[/quote]

Er, no. We're just a temporarily successful product thereof. One that could become very quickly unsuccessful even without some of our less than delightful habits. The non-avian dinosaurs, if they had ever acquired cognition similar to ours, might have entertained similar vanities and conceits just before that 10 km bolide paid them a visit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Humankind now knows more than any other species, about other species and about the world generally.

All of which could come to a very sudden end if another large bolide turns up saying ""Trick or Treat".

Jayjay4547 wrote:That perception is no longer grounds for preening: (a) we still know squat (b) our pinnacle knowledge can be used for evil, possibly the ultimate evil of turning Earth into a slave planet.

None of which validates any of your fantasy assertions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s still true that the Great Chain of Being was a static model of hierarchy in a fixed settled state of nature. It is confused to associate it with progress.

Don't bother me with this, instead, start bothering the large number of antecedents who first erected this. I'm simply noting the historical fact that they did this.

Oh look, more bullshit and lies in the in tray. Here we fucking go again.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Coastal wrote:

Are we all wrong about everything or just what you say we're wrong about?

I’m arguing that atheist posters tend to be wrong about a characteristic set of beliefs that make up the atheist ideology.

Lies and bullshit. Your "atheist ideology" does not exist, it is a fabrication of your imagination. Because you have never once been able to point to any assertion routinely erected by atheists en masse that would form the basis of any "ideology". Your complete failure to do this destroys your "atheist ideology" fabrication, along with many other relevant lines of evidence.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Coastal wrote:You do not seem to want to understand how you come across here if you write things like what I quoted above, that we are all wrong.

I haven’t found atheist posters being too polite to tell me how I come across to them.

Drop once and for all the synthetic whingeing about post style, Jayjay, which you are in no position to do, as a result of having been repeatedly exposed as peddling manifest fabrications and bare faced lies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Coastal wrote:How do you expect people to react to such a statement? How do you expect people to view you?

I expect people to react politely to an argument that they tend to be wrong about a characteristic set of beliefs that make up the atheist ideology.

Why should any of us here be "polite" to someone who routinely peddles lies about us, and who does this repeatedly, in an egregious manner?

Once again, your specious whingeing about post style is steamingly hypocritical, in the light of the numerous instances of rampant discoursive duplicity contained in your posts.

Once again, and do fucking LEARN this after I've been telling you this umpteen times, WE DON'T BOTHER WITH BELIEF ITSELF. WE THINK BELIEF IS A SAD FUCKING JOKE. Which on its own DESTROYS your tiresome "atheist ideology" fabrication.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Coastal wrote:
However, you really have not presented any examples or evidence for an atheist ideology that I could find.

In my response to Calli above there are fairly long arguments that atheists characteristically and wrongly:
(a) deny progress in evolution.
(b) deny creativity in evolution as what prevents confident prediction of the biological future.

Lies and bullshit.

One, there is nothing to "deny". The reason we consider that there is no such thing as "progress" in evolution, is BECAUSE THE FUCKING DATA SAYS SO. There is NO single, unified direction inherent in evolutionary processes. All that there is, and once again, this is what THE DATA TELLS US. is LOCAL MOVEMENTS TOWARDS LOCAL FITNESS MAXIMA.

Indeed, if you had bothered studying even basic calculus, JayJay, you would realise that in any space populated by lots of maxima, movement from one maximum to another cannot be the product of a continuous function. The only way that movement from a given local maximum can occur, is if that local maximum ceases to be a maximum as a result of other influences. I don't intend to spend the next decade tutoring you on differential geometry, so you can go and learn about this for yourself.

As for denying "creativity", oh wait, this is what CREATIONISTS routinely assert, not us. It's CREATIONISTS who routinely assert that evolutionary processes purportedly cannot produce novel functions, despite vast amounts of empirical evidence refuting this assertion. On the other hand, WE are the ones ACCEPTING THAT EVIDENCE! Which means your part B above is a manifest bare faced lie.

As for the idea that this somehow magically makes prediction impossible, read those scientific papers I've presented and fucking weep. What makes prediction difficult, though not impossible, is the volume of data, combined with the large number of dimensions inherent in any reasonably complete model of that data.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s strange you haven’t noticed these arguments or didn't pick up that they allege particular ideological beliefs.

Bullshit and lies. Oh wait, once again, WE DON'T BOTHER WITH BELIEF ITSELF. WE THINK BELIEF IS A SAD FUCKING JOKE. Because belief consists of nothing more than uncritical acceptance of unsupported assertions. We,. on the other hand, think assertions should be subject to test, and discarded if those tests tell us to discard them, which is the very antithesis of "ideology". Once again, another of the MANY reasons your "atheist ideology" fabrication IS a fabrication. Now fucking drop this tiresome fabrication once and for all, will you?

Meanwhile, dealing with this:

It’s really that everyone else on this forum is wrong, not everyone else in the world. So I can answer a related question: why do I come to a forum where everyone says I’m wrong? I could go to other forums where everyone would just look puzzled. This is a place where I have found I can develop threads of ideas, through meeting opposition to them. It’s exciting, a romantic intellectual journey.

It's entirely typical of creationist arrogance, to see the repeated peddling of fabrications and outright lies as purportedly constituting fact, whilst ignoring all the contrary evidence pointing to said fabrications and lies being precisely that, as a "romantic journey". Those of us who are heartily sick and tired of having these fabrications and lies peddled about us, far from regarding your duplicitous apologetic elisions as a "romantic journey", regard them as steamingly hypocritical and a flagrant, egregious abuse of the most elementary principles of proper discourse. In short, we regard your "romantic journey" as a stinking pile of shit.

But of course, we're used to the notion that creationists not only regard their assertions as exempt from the usual rules of discourse, but also regard it as entirely permissible to peddle lies about those not conforming to creationist doctrine. It's all part of the standard creationist ideological agenda, which consists of treating those not conforming to doctrine as an "enemy" to be extirpated, and an "enemy" moreover, that is purportedly wholly undeserving of any extension of basic, decent, humane conduct. In short, creationists routinely regard people such as the regular posters here as "subhuman vermin", fit only to be burned at the stake, and as a corollary, that the creationist conscience need not be unduly troubled by peddling lies about that "subhuman vermin". This ideological partitioning of humanity into an "elect", namely those conforming to the doctrine, and the unfortunate rest, deemed by the "elect" to be purportedly in need of various "re-education" measures, or outright extermination, and which is manifested in particularly florid fashion in creationist and religious fundamentalist circles, is all too often something that we atheists oppose, which once again is yet another of the many pieces of evidence rendering the "atheist ideology" fabrication precisely that.

Not that I expect you, JayJay, to do anything other with all of this contrary evidence, but either ignore it, or twist it to suit your manifest ideological agenda, whilst mendaciously projecting the modus operandi underpinning your ideological agenda upon us. Because your "atheist ideology" fabrication is a blatant exercise in the projection of your ideological modus operandi onto us, a projection that is so manifestly and crassly false, that it should be beneath deserving of a point of view, and to many here, has been for some time. The only reason we deal with this robotically parroted lie you repeatedly disseminate, is the proper business of ensuring that lies do not pass unchallenged. Otherwise, this sad little lie you've been peddling for over two years, would be regarded as beneath the level of competence required to do anything other than ignore it. Your duplicitous repeat peddling of this lie, of course, means that we need to be vigilant, in order that the Goebbels mechanism does not come into play, because this is what you are hoping will happen with your repeated parroting of this manifest bare faced lie, namely that someone will eventually start regarding it as something other than a manifest bare faced lie.

This is NOT going to happen, JayJay. Every time you peddle this lie, we will call you out on this, point out the multiple reasons WHY your bare faced lie IS a bare faced lie, and expose the charlatanism endemic to your posts for the world to see. Let's see how fucking "romantic" you think this is.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Western atheists are heirs to a particular social movement with its own history and confronted with a particular opposition

Oh look, it's homogenising stereotype time again. Heard of Epicurus, have you? Oh wait, he was writing his works fully two hundred and fifty years before Christianity existed. A famous objection to supernatural entities is ascribed thereto. Some scholars consider that famous objection to be more correctly attributed to Carneades, again alive two centuries before Christianity existed. A succinct rendition of this objection is given below:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

It’s part of the social movement of modern atheism to grab that argument with delight, store it somewhere and trot it out as a stick to beat the opposition.

Once and for all, JayJay, stop peddling the bare face lie, that recognising the existence of carefully constructed, reasoned arguments refuting assertions about magic entities, purportedly constitutes an "ideological" exercise. Which I pointed to specifically to refute your above insinuation that modern atheism is nothing more than an exercise in bashing Christianity. It isnt. Modern atheism treats all mythology based doctrines with the same well-deserved suspicion, a suspicion that arises because supernaturalists have never supported their assertions about magic entities with real evidence. We've been waiting 5,000 years for supernaturalists to deliver the goods on this, right the way from the Ancient Sumerians, and all that supernaturalists have presented throughout that time period, has been blind assertions and apologetic fabrications. Recognising this observable fact, JayJay, isn't "atheist ideology", and many here, myself included, are becoming heartily sick and tired of your continued peddling of this blatant fabrication of yours, as though it purportedly constituted fact. It is NOT fact, JayJay, it's a blatant fabrication of yours, a fabrication you have repeatedly parroted without an atom of evidence to support it, just as supernaturalists routinely parrot assertions bereft of proper evidential support.

What I was arguing above is that your publication of your ancient Greek quote above is evidence of the existence of the social movement I alleged. It’s unlikely that you just happened to have read Epicurus, more likely you read what earlier atheists had garnered, and stored away as part of your armory.

The rest of your paragraph just regurgitates your wrong clam that to disagree with you is to lie, and your wrong notion that religions are based on asserted facts when actually they are based on assertion of mystery in that part of the world that we can’t investigate scientifically.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

We have been over this before; it’s not necessary for the usefulness of the classification “ex-Christian atheists” that a particular individual change from Christianity [for them to be classified as ex-Christian atheists].

Poppycock. Your fatuous and blatantly false attempt to peddle this stereotype is refuted by the real world evidence, that many atheists never adhered to a religion at any time in their lives, and many other atheists were previously adherents of religions different from Christianity. Stop trying to peddle blatant fabrications as fact, JayJay, no one here regards your fabrications as being anything other than this. What's more, we know what you're up to with this latest fabrication, namely the attempt to create a fake picture of atheists as some sort of "ideologically homogeneous" mass, a picture that IS fake not only for the reason given above, but also fake because, once again, the ONLY thing atheists have in common, is suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions. That is IT, and your blatantly specious attempt to paint this as an "ideology" is even more fake than a thirteen pound note.

The atheists on this creationism board are demonstrably homogeneous; indeed you use that, in your confident assumption that “we know what you’re up to with this latest fabrication”. However you might bicker and joust in social corners of RatSkep, when it comes to the face you present to opposition, one seldom sees the slightest disagreement, rather a uniform tolerance of some pretty ugly behavior.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Religion has been leaching out of western Christian society for many generations in a complex social process.

No kidding? Oh wait, this might have much to do with the fact that not only have supernaturalists completely failed to support any of their assertions, a level of failure that makes a pathetic contrast with the success of proper, rigorous academic disciplines, but that supernaturalists have been caught engaging in heinous, indeed crriminal behaviours, on an institutional level, behaviours that would have resulted in the usual smug, self-satisfied crowing if it had arisen from atheists. That's before we factor in the most recent and truly noxious manifestation of supernaturalism, in the form of Islamic State, who are providing more service to atheism every time they upload another beheading video to YouTube, than to any religion. I note the delicious irony of IS using Western technology to peddle their evil propaganda, whilst at the same time railing against every development of Enlightenment thought that made that technology possible. But I'm not the only one who has long since ceased expecting consistency from supernaturalists.

IS are making sure they present an ugly face to Westerners and also to other slightly different sects of Islam. In return their own lives are held cheap by Westerners. How many are being killed from each side and with how much compunction are they being killed? What are the human implications of killing someone in Iraq while sitting safely in a chair in America? Today that man might be a Christian but the possible absorption of man into machine is worrying. Maybe that is near the heart of the confrontation that militant Islamists have been provoking.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
You seldom avoid substance, but you lard it with abuse.

Do you need reminding of the elementary principles in operation here again, JayJay?

I, and others here, will heap as much invective upon bad ideas as we wish. Because in the world of proper discourse, ideas are disposable entities. As a corollary of this elementary principle, you are not your ideas, a corollary that on its own blows your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water with a nuclear depth charge. We who prefer adherence to proper standards of discourse over adherence to doctrines, who by doing so, also blow your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water on a grand scale, recognise that the ideas one subscribes to can change.

Quite simply, we regard adherence to proper discoursive standards as a first step in the proper analysis of ideas, and do so on the basis of evidence that this procedure works, just in case you're tempted to erect specious apologetic fabrications about "belief" at this point. Central to those standards, is a requirement that assertions are subject to test, before a truth value is assigned thereto, courtesy of the fact that before such test, all assertions presented within the arena of discourse possess the status "truth value unknown". Again, our recognition of this elementary fact, also blows your "atheist ideology" fabrication out of the water on a grand scale. Also central to those standards, is a requirement that relevant information be disseminated in an honest manner. Fidelity to the known facts, fidelity to known and demonstrably working rules of deduction and inference, and fidelity to the matter of addressing what other discoursive participants actually present, as opposed to one's own fabrications with respect thereto, are again, elementary principles that we regard, on the basis of evidence that they work, as necessary. Vast swathes of your posts, on the other hand, lead inexorably to the conclusion that you regard these principles as an impediment to the imposition of hegemony for your ideology and its assertions, an impediment to be brushed aside whenever it is apologetically convenient. But I digress.

Quite simply, JayJay, we, on the basis of large bodies of relevant evidence, regard bad ideas as fit only to be destroyed, because permitting bad ideas to persist, has a habit of resulting in the destruction of human beings. It's not as if doctrine centred world views, both supernaturalist and otherwise, have failed to provide the evidence in question. As a corollary, when we see bad ideas being peddled, particularly when they are peddled in a mendacious manner, with flagrant disregard of the elementary principles of discourse, we treat those bad ideas, and any mendacity in the presentation thereof, with the scorn and derision they deserve. If you don't like this taking place, JayJay, then the answer is simple, namely, stop presenting bad ideas, and stop abusing the principles of proper discourse. Your specious attempts to place fault upon us for exposing your manifest deficiencies here, is an entirely typical exercise in discoursive duplicity, that we see routinely emanating from supernaturalists.

It would be hard to imagine a more pompous defense of calling someone you disagree with a liar.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:That helps to build the presentation of what atheist are like and what you can expect if you say boo to them.

Given the abuse we've had to endure from supernaturalists for millennia, no one here is suprised at the whingeing and bleating that emerges, now that we're no longer standing for this, and taking the fight back to supernaturalists. It's only to be expected, once we start telling supernaturalists in vigorous terms, that we're no longer going to put up with their duplicitous stereotypes, their fabrications, their outright lies and their attempts to confer untermensch status upon us, just because we don't treat sad little fairy tales as fact. Quite simply, JayJay, we're telling people like you that your nasty little party is over. To borrow a phrase that was current about the time the Civil Rights movement was active in the USA, we're no longer going to stand for being regarded as niggers.

So now atheists are a bunch of people with a particular history.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: "] an ideology consists of more than not treating unsupported assertions as fact. It seems to me that seeing that an ideology is maintained by people and that they invest in it therefore a whole set of attitudes, biases, easy agreement on certain issues and calumnies about opposing ideologies are bound to be associated with it

Ha ha ha ha ha. Nice to see you borrow from my own discourses on the subject here.

Then you should agree that atheism consists of more than not treating unsupported assertions as fact.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Whenever there is sustained opposition to some position held by a group, ideologies emerge.

Not quite. But of course, I'm used to quantifier abuse on the part of supernaturalists.
Whilst some people may react to a particular set of bad ideas, by erecting their own collections of unsupported assertions in response, others respond with analysis. But please, don't let this elementary fact sway you from yet more duplicitous apologetics.

I’m arguing that a dialectic emerges, with both sides developing carapaces of defense and offense; specifically in the opposition of evolution to creation.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not defamatory to argue that scientist allow ideology to influence their output.

Yes it is. What's more, I suspect a good number of scientists, if you peddle this assertion to them, will tell you where to get off in no uncertain terms, especially those who have laboured diligently to demonstrate evidential support for their hypotheses.

I was repeating your term “allow” and I shouldn’t have; I should have said that it’s not defamatory to argue that scientists are influenced by ideology in the things they say. For example, in denying progress in evolution. Indeed in the other disciplines that deal with history, it’s freely acknowledged that practitioners are influenced by their social setting.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Peer review is nearly powerless to stop it because the peers share the same mind set.

Lies. Oh wait. specious notions of "progress" were once a part of biological thinking. The reason they were jettisoned, was because the evidence said that there was no such thing as "progress" in the biosphere, and indeed that the term was meaningless when applied thereto. Because the very concept of "progress" implies an externally defined and applied goal that is simply not present in the biosphere. Once again, there is NO externally applied goal, NO teleology, and NO magic entities generating this.

That’s the story line and it’s an effective one, because people jump away from ideas that are presented as outmoded, towards “it is now thought that”. But as I argued before and will again, we familiarly apply the word “progress” to technological evolution, without having the foggiest notion where it is headed.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
It’s astronomers who have predicted what everyone agrees on, that the sun will not sustain life here forever rather as it travels along the main sequence, the sun will eventually kill everything

Actually, biologists have additional reasons for suggesting that photosynthesising plants will not be sustainable in the distant future. Courtesy of the fact that as the Sun starts to increase its heat output, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decrease below the point where photosynthesising plants can operate. From here, we learn the following:….

“As the sun starts to increase its heat output” is about its travelling along the main sequence. Your massive pasted quote about predictions of how life might eventually be stifled, is beside the point.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: But so long as the biological process lasts, our experience of its behavior, like that of technological evolution, should tell us that we are powerless to predict what a later observer will identify as fascinating history.

Please tell that to the authors of the above papers.

So long as humans survive-and maybe beyond, technology will also continue to evolve and the fact that we can use highly predictive astronomy to predict that eventually the sun will stifle technology here, as it will stifle biological life, doesn’t contradict that while these creative systems exist and function, we are powerless to predict what a later observer will identify as fascinating history.

This might be a good time and place to note that the hoped for 12th November landing of Philae rings a bell with Olaf Stapledon’s great SF story Last and First Men where, after billions of years of evolving in the solar system, the Last Men send their seed riding out on the shock wave of our dying sun, to pollinate other systems. If there is any body capable of collecting such broadcast seeds from other systems it is a great lump of ice that has been sitting so long in our Oort belt. Then life wouldn’t end with the sun.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: [Our embeddedness in nature] It just stops biologists from erecting confident predictions of the future of life, at the time scale of evolution.

No, what makes prediction difficultis the volume of data, and the existence of multiple interaction paths within that data. None of which means that scientists aren't able to extract those multiple interaction paths from the data. Oh, but wait, a number of predictions can confidently be made, on the basis of empirical evidence. Such as the prediction that genetically isolated populations will eventually cease to be interfertile, and will therefore constitute new species. Indeed, one of my favourite papers on Cichlid fish evolution, reveals that a study of Cynotilapia afra may yield, in the future, an example of a documented speciation event in the wild, accompanied by a genetic audit trail. Indeed, since numerous papers exist in which incipient speciation events have been generated in the laboratory, biologists can confidently predict that speciation events, far from being wildly unusual events requiring magic input, are perfectly comprehensible natural processes that occur on a regular basis, whenever genetic isolation and trophic specialisation are in place. See, for example, Rhagoletis pomonella

.

Nothing remarkable about speciation events then? Happen all the time? That would be the ultimate stodgification of the history of life, one of the most regrettable influences of atheist ideology.

The problem with attributing lack of predictability about biological evolution to the complexity of data, is that you can’t apply that argument to technological evolution. We fail to predict technological evolution, because that will depend on things we don’t yet know about the world.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

I didn’t claim in any way that being embedded in an evolving technology stops physicists or their allies or anyone else, from doing their work- except where that work is confidently predicting the long term future of technological evolution.

It's really amusing, seeing you trying to use an alleged "deficit" on the part of scientists here, to erect fatuous assertions that you purportedly know better, on the basis of nothing more than the treatment of your own ideological assertions as purportedly constituting fact. Oh, by the way, you are aware that Arthur C. Clarke predicted the advent of geostationary satellites before they existed? He predicted this in 1945. The first geostationary satellite to be launched was Syncom 3, dating from 1964.

[/quote]

It’s a misreading of my argument to see it as about an alleged “deficit” in scientists. I don’t think I used that word at all. I’ve emphasized that everyone is in the same condition when it comes to predicting the future of a creative system: scientists, novelists and religious seers. You seem to be making out that scientists are omniscient but like the rest of us, they aren’t.

Heaven knows Clarke got enough mileage out his successful geostationary satellite prediction. Good for him. What he didn’t predict was the flavor of the internet. He inevitably failed to comprehend the 21st century.

Part 2 follows in a while.

More lies, blind assertions and deliberate misrepresentation. It's getting quite old Jayjay.
Also sharing a history =/= sharing an ideology.

It isn't a creative system, it's a stochastic system.

As you have already blindly lumped any discussion of stochastic systems into your "atheist ideology" and refused to justify the assertion I expect no credible response.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The atheists on this creationism board are demonstrably homogeneous; indeed you use that, in your confident assumption that “we know what you’re up to with this latest fabrication”. However you might bicker and joust in social corners of RatSkep, when it comes to the face you present to opposition, one seldom sees the slightest disagreement, rather a uniform tolerance of some pretty ugly behavior.

You seldom see anything you don't want to see.

People here are likely to be united in, for example, seeing your posts as being laced with obtuseness and dishonesty, because that is demonstrably the case.

Similarly, if faced with creationist 'arguments' from others, responses will often be similar because the 'arguments' are old and full of well-known flaws.

Commonalities tend to be because there is a coherent scientific picture which most sufficiently educated people share.
But that's not an 'atheist' picture, it is simply one that a quite particular subset of religious believers want to ignore, pretend is wrong , or misrepresent of otherwise lie about.

It is no more 'atheist' than psychiatry-not-including-demonic-possession or geology-not-including-biblical-flood-stories is 'atheist'.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m arguing that a dialectic emerges, with both sides developing carapaces of defense and offense; specifically in the opposition of evolution to creation.

But you are, once again, confusing 'atheism' with 'being educated in biology'.

The two are not the same thing. Many atheists know little biology, many competent biologists are believers, it's just that competent biologists with belief who are active creationists seem to be fairly rare. Rarer than anyone would expect if the evidence actually pointed towards creation.

If anything, it's the existence of aggressive creationism generations past its intellectual sell-by-date which has prompted quite a few atheists to educate themselves about biology, just as to a somewhat smaller extent, people claiming the earth is a few thousand years old have likely spurred some atheists into reading about geology.

But what such people find is not atheist biology or atheist geology. It is simply biology and geology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So now atheists are a bunch of people with a particular history.

Anyone can choose to identify with the history of other people if they can point to anything they have in common.
Personally I wouldn't tend to do that to the extent Cali does, but that's a matter of personal taste.

I find the possible number of groups I could identify with pretty overwhelming. I could choose to identify with 'working-class people from a particular small area of the country since the start of the Industrial revolution'. But doing so would hardly be evidence of the existence of 'An ideology' among such people.
Not least because even to the extent that I might imagine them thinking a particular way, I may well be indulging in a deal of projection by doing so.
Arguably Cali was doing that to some extent, but you would be the last person in a position to judge him for that, since you're projecting a strawman version of atheism onto atheists as a whole and then claiming that as evidence of some ideological conspiracy
That's not just projection, it's fucking paranoia.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I should have said that it’s not defamatory to argue that scientists are influenced by ideology in the things they say. For example, in denying progress in evolution.

Anyone who honestly looked at the issue with an open mind would understand why scientists are reluctant to use the word (even though some might, in particular context.).
One major reason is because 'progress' does imply some kind of standard by which to judge things, but if one looks at a pig-like cetacean ancestor and a whale, how could we say which one was 'better'?
That's about as daft as asking "Which is better, an adder or a sparrow?".

We can certainly look at particular abilities of various organisms and recognise that abilities now present in living organisms were once not present, but to do so does not require the use of the word 'progress'.

We could consider 'local progress' in terms of things like evolutionary arms races, but even there we are choosing a particular perspective to judge things from. If predator and prey co-evolve to be faster runners, it is quite likely that they will have lost some abilities as part of the compromise which gave them greater speed. Put the faster animal back into its ancestor's situation, and it may well do worse than its ancestors would have done.

If you can point to some actual facts which you claim justify the use of the label 'progress', which biologists are denying the existence of those facts, rather than saying (with reasons why they say it) that they simply wouldn't use the label you want them to use or choose to criticise them for not using?

JayJay wrote:

Heaven knows Clarke got enough mileage out his successful geostationary satellite prediction. Good for him. What he didn’t predict was the flavor of the internet. He inevitably failed to comprehend the 21st century.

Arthur C. Clarke - 1974
[H]e will have, in his own house, not a computer as big as this, [points to nearby computer], but at least, a console through which he can talk, through his local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theatre reservations, all the information you need in the course of living in our complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house ... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."

Global personal wireless communication devices - 1959

Personal Global positioning devices - 1959

Global television broadcasts on hundreds of stations - 1959

Global computer library and database - 1962

I think that Clarke captured the flavor of our early 21st century electronic wireless existence quite nicely.

Fenrir wrote:It isn't a creative system, it's a stochastic system.

As you have already blindly lumped any discussion of stochastic systems into your "atheist ideology" and refused to justify the assertion I expect no credible response.

I’ll see what I can do, again. I have to argue that (a) Evolution is indeed a creative system (b) You (your students, professors, text book writers) get it wrong because of the influence of an atheist ideology.

On (a), I have to back down straight away, because natural selection as successfully described by Darwin (variation, selection, inheritance) is stochastic; it is a blind trial-and-error seeking out of what works. The rubber is that phrase “what works”. Because, as soon as one starts telling a narrative history about evolution then the path described seems to be ruled by logic. Again, I’ll go over how that applies to the narrative of human evolution.

The non-protruding canines of the australopiths shows that they had abandoned the biting antipredation habit of other primates, while the use of identifiable worked stones by later australopiths or early homo, makes a strong inference that they defended themselves using hand held weapons.

Where logos comes is that, it is awkward for a brain to be right up against the body of a predator that has determined to eat one. That brain is likely to face high accelerations and its growth from birth is inhibited by a thick protective skull and strong muscle attachments. So by distancing the brain a metre away from the predator, the brain adaptations are released from some constraints that a biting defense suffers from.

Years ago, these advantages and preadaptations of having a think-head that is not also a war-head presented themselves strongly to me but the other day I noticed an advantage of having them close. A security guy came to my house and my africanus dog, who associates alarms with the security firm, rushed up to him. In the instant that the guard slammed the vehicle door, the dog dived in under and tore his trousers. Such a nice guy but I felt obliged to pay for a new pair of trousers, which fixed the experience in my mind. What struck me was the incredible speed and agility of the dog’s use of his head and jaws, an advantage of close coupling between thinking and doing.

The australopiths were sympatric with cape hunting dogs of about the same size as my dog, and they hunt in packs like wolves. So hominins were under adaptive pressure to make up for the extra nervous delay in their defensive actions, by mental developments for the decisive, accurate and quick use of objects at the ends of their arms, and of objects like sticks whose attitude was not automatically reported back to the cerebellum by proprioceptors. Workarounds were needed in the australopith brain. A bit like how the technologists controlling the Rosetta spacecraft have to use their high intelligence to direct the craft in critical maneuvers without real-time feedback.

In a rational world all that should have been worked out , developed and as necessary rejected by scientists, in the 90 years since the first australopith fossil was discovered. But it hasn’t been, on the evidence of Treves and Palmqvist’s chapter Reconstructing Hominin Interactions with Mammalian Carivores (6.0-1.8Ma)

http://faculty.nelson.wisc.edu/treves/p ... t_2007.pdf

When I cite an article that has been cited before, Calli usually rounds on me, I hope you won’t do the same.

That chapter has an extensive reference list, it is an authoritative review article. The authors report that the hominins were doubtless predated, probably lived in groups of up to 20, avoided areas of high predation risk, signaled dangers to each other, retreated to safe places at night, probably didn’t try to chase predators from their kills but might well have used weapons effectively to defend themselves. Every one of those except the last could apply just as well to baboons-who were also sympatric and in greater variety of form than the australopiths. But why was there no convergence in physiology between baboons and hominins, under the same predation pressure from the same predators, of about the same size, with similar diets and with the same social adaptations? The simplest answer is because the baboons stuck to the primate biting defense while the hominins used hand weapons. That should deserve some mention in a 30 page article on hominin interactions with mammalian carnivores.
Instead their final summing up is this:

“We propose that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was a social adaptation that preceded any elaboration of material culture”.

A more rational conclusion would have been that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was into the defensive use of hand weapons that preceded any elaboration of material culture.

At any rate, considering the time Treves and Palmqvist spend discarding the notion that the hominins chased predators from their prey, it needs explanation why paleoanthropologists shouldn’t have long ago looked deeply at the possible implications of defensive weapon use for brain physiology, individual life story, gender relations and preadaption for the later encephalisation of the hominins.

(b) What does that have to do with atheist ideology? Atheists like to insist on evolution as a random process. For example you do, when you insist that evolution is NOT creative, and it IS stochastic. If the change that evolution has brought about over the last 3.5 billion years, from algal mats to algal mats, elephants, mice, internet, bees, wasps, flowers, gum trees, cockatoos- – if that isn’t “creative”, then to what would you apply the word “creative”? You want to discount the role of logic in the human origin narrative especially In the context of origin narrative, Stochastic”, “random” and “chance” have the connotation of “no God”. While logic has the connotation of god- "Logos" is actually a word for God in Hellenized Christianity.

So basically, atheists have fucked up the human origin narrative just to keep words and ideas that have some connection with God, out of their minds.

Oldskeptic wrote:



I think that Clarke captured the flavor of our early 21st century electronic wireless existence quite nicely.

Yes, quite a seer.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Fenrir wrote:It isn't a creative system, it's a stochastic system.

As you have already blindly lumped any discussion of stochastic systems into your "atheist ideology" and refused to justify the assertion I expect no credible response.

I’ll see what I can do, again. I have to argue that (a) Evolution is indeed a creative system

And present evidence Jayjay, not assertions or misrepresentations.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(b) You (your students, professors, text book writers) get it wrong because of the influence of an atheist ideology.

You can't, because you've failed to:
A. Accurately define what this supposed atheist ideology is.
B. Present evidence of it's existence.
Oh and your hubris is also quite silly and misplaced.

Jayjay4547 wrote:On (a), I have to back down straight away, because natural selection as successfully described by Darwin (variation, selection, inheritance) is stochastic; it is a blind trial-and-error seeking out of what works. The rubber is that phrase “what works”. Because, as soon as one starts telling a narrative history about evolution then the path described seems to be ruled by logic. Again, I’ll go over how that applies to the narrative of human evolution.

You do realise that the ToE has moved on since the orginal version postulated by Darwin?

Jayjay4547 wrote:The non-protruding canines of the australopiths shows that they had abandoned the biting antipredation habit of other primates, while the use of identifiable worked stones by later australopiths or early homo, makes a strong inference that they defended themselves using hand held weapons.

And we're back to assertion territory.
Evidence Jayjay, not circular apologetics.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
“We propose that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was a social adaptation that preceded any elaboration of material culture”.

A more rational conclusion would have been that the adaptive solution to the higher predation pressure of the end Miocene and Pliocene was into the defensive use of hand weapons that preceded any elaboration of material culture.

It wouldn't. You have presented fuck all evidence for that assertion. Just because it's your favorite answer doesn't make it more logical, let alone factual.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(b) What does that have to do with atheist ideology? Atheists like to insist on evolution as a random process.

They don't Jayjay, stop lying.
Atheism has nothing to do with evolution or any other scientific theory for that matter.
It's the absence of belief in deities, nothing more.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(For example you do, when you insist that evolution is NOT creative, and it IS stochastic.

That's because of the facts, not atheism.

Jayjay4547 wrote: If the change that evolution has brought about over the last 3.5 billion years ago, from algal mats to algal mats, elephants, mice, internet, bees, wasps, flowers, gum trees, cockatoos- – if that isn’t “creative”, then to what would you apply the word “creative”? You want to discount the role of logic in the human origin narrative especially In the context of origin narrative, Stochastic”, “random” and “chance” have the connotation of “no God”. While logic has the connotation of god- "Logos" is actually a word for God in Hellenized Christianity.

So basically, atheists have fucked up the human origin narrative just to keep words and ideas that have some connection with God, out of their minds.

Basically you're continuing your pathetically dishonest routine of pulling shite out of your arse in a desperate attempt to attack atheism.
Eventhough people have repeatedly pointed out the flaws, fantasies and outright lies in your post.
You won't convince any rational skeptic with this crap Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

JayJay wrote:



I think that Clarke captured the flavor of our early 21st century electronic wireless existence quite nicely.

Yes, quite a seer.

So, you'll retract your assertion that scientists can't predict the future?

If you have any evidence whatsoever that evolution is in the business of actively searching for solutions then why have you never presented any?

Evolution, as a process, does not actively search out solutions to perceived inadequacies. It simply adopts innovations which work, by increasing the number of individuals with the innovation and decreasing the number of those without. The mechanisms leading to genetic innovation are reliably modelled as stochastic. Models which rely on creativity are not used as it has been found that they do not model reality reliably, if at all.

Science does not include creativity in descriptions of reality. Not through deliberate application of ideology, but because creativity is a word which does not describe reality as observed.

As you have had pointed out to you repeatedly. In detail. With example and reference.

And ignored repeatedly.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(b) What does that have to do with atheist ideology? Atheists like to insist on evolution as a random process. For example you do, when you insist that evolution is NOT creative, and it IS stochastic. If the change that evolution has brought about over the last 3.5 billion years, from algal mats to algal mats, elephants, mice, internet, bees, wasps, flowers, gum trees, cockatoos- – if that isn’t “creative”, then to what would you apply the word “creative”?

Personally, I'd tend to apply 'creative' to things typically conscious agents do as a result of not simply taking small steps but making a leap to somewhere else.

If we talk of some particular mobile phone or car as being part of an evolutionary process, we're typically talking about changes from a previous version being minor and frequently rather obvious (in the sense that one wouldn't be surprised by pretty much any designer coming up with them) rather than something really new or particularly inventive.
Possibly excluding iStuff and Apple fanboys, pretty much any such change is effectively a "Meh!", but over time, a bag full of "Meh!" can add up to a "Wow!", since 'obviousness' is not some static thing, but environment-dependent.

And ultimately, just as with 'progress', you're basically bitching about people choosing not to use a certain label for a process.

People are not being taught that things didn't happen which happened, they are simply typically not being taught particular potentially loaded labels to use, with the reasons for that not being at all hidden, nor being dependent on a lack of deity-belief.

You could argue for evolution being 'blindly creative' as a philosophical description of it, but biology teachers are not there to teach philosophy in general, or your philosophy in particular.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So basically, atheists have fucked up the human origin narrative just to keep words and ideas that have some connection with God, out of their minds.

Biologists have not chosen to teach a particular view which coincides with your speculative one regarding hominid tooth-fighting, but which appears to have nothing to do with religious belief.

Also, they choose not to use words implying some general inevitability of the present, and tend to try and avoid value-laden language implying one organism is 'better' than another in some objective sense.
But obviously, people (biologists included) are free to think and talk about the relative merits of organisms in some particular selected context.

Oh wait, stochastic modelling has been a foundational, and extremely successful, part of evolutionary genetics, since the first attempts to construct mathematical models of gene distributions in populations were launched. The reason being, of course, that the emergence of mutations in a population is an inherently stochastic process, namely, a process that can be modelled by a an appropriately chosen random variable defined on an appropriate probability space.

Quite simply, although scientists are aware of the existence of well-defined chemical reactions leading to the generation of mutations in a genome, what they do not know, is which of the multiplicity of options actually occurs in a given instance at the moment of occurrence. it's possible after the fact to narrow down those options, once detailed information about the parent and child genomes becomes available, but in the most general case, none of this information is available, and so, on the basis of analysis of populations, one constructs a model in which each possible mutation can occur with a specific probability, and lets the model run with those mutations occurring with those probabilities. In addition, one also defines another random variable, the fitness of a given trait, which changes randomly with the emergence of a mutation affecting that trait. This is frequently chosen to be a variable that can take a range of values within an interval [-F, +F], with negative values signifying low fitness, and positive values signifying high fitness, the idea being that when selection processes apply to those traits, those selection processes act to eliminate traits with large negative fitness values, and promote the propagation of traits with large positive fitness values. This immediately allows us to model neutral drift, namely the near-absence of selection upon traits whose fitness value is close to zero.

We then set up the model to associate clocks with each simulated organism and its trait vector (this being an array of N traits, say, each with an associated fitness value), one clock determining the time of life (i.e., when in the model run the organism will die), and the time to maturity (i.e., when in the model run the organism will be capable of producing offspring). The data objects corresponding to dead organisms are returned to a pool of such objects, for recycling when generating new organisms (i.e., offspring), though the details of this part of the model management do not affect the nature of the model. The time to death clock values are determined by total fitness, whilst the time to maturity values are randomly selected from an interval of the form [a,b], where a is the earliest age of maturity, and b the latest age of maturity for the organisms.

When we run such a model, we find that, just as in real biological populations, the organisms at the bottom of the fitness distribution are eliminated before reaching maturity and the production of offspring, whilst those at the top of the fitness distribution end up dominating the population. In other words, the model is in accord with observed data.

As a corollary, the use of stochastic models, far from being a product of JayJay's fictitious "atheist ideology", is motivated by the fact that they work, and generate realistic data that is in accord with observation. Moreover, experimentation with model parameters can prove useful in teasing out various interesting population phenomena (e.g., the Allee Effect).

Furthermore, the model can be extended, to include such features as interactions between traits, so that, for example, one can model a situation where two traits of relatively modest fitness, when inherited in isolation, produce either much lower or much higher fitness when inherited together, and take this into account in future runs. This allows the determination of more subtle population behaviours over time arising from epistasis.

In fact, it should be within the remit of some of the coders here, to take the above information, and put together their own JavaScript implementation of this model, that works in any web browser, and generates a nice pool of data that can then be rendered on the web page, both as an overview of the population allowing homing in on particular individuals, and the display of histograms and other plots for the population as a whole. Indeed, the very fact that disparate individuals can do this independently, and verify that the resulting model behaves in accord with observation, destroys at a stroke JayJay's duplicitous "atheist ideology" lies with respect to the matter of the applicability of stochasticity to evolutionary genetics.

EDIT: Oh look what I found. A scientific paper applying a model of this very sort to the emergence of cancer cells. Viz:

From The Mathematical Kinetic, And Stochastic Game Theory To Modelling Mutations, Onset, Progression And Immune Competition Of Cancer Cells by L. Bellomo & M. Delitalia, Physics of Life Reviews, 5: 183-206 (26th July 2008) [Full paper downloadable from here]

Bellomo & Delitala, 2008 wrote:Abstract

This paper deals with a review and critical analysis on the mathematical kinetic theory of active particles applied to the modelling of the very early stage of cancer phenomena, specifically mutations, onset, progression of cancer cells, and their competition with the immune system. The mathematical theory describes the dynamics of large systems of interacting entities whose microscopic state includes not only geometrical and mechanical variables, but also specific biological functions. Applications are focused on the modelling of complex biological systems where two scales at the level of genes and cells interact generating the heterogeneous onset of cancer phenomena. The analysis also refers to the derivation of tissue level models from the underlying description at the lower scales. The review is constantly linked to a critical analysis focused on various open problems including the ambitious objective of developing a mathematical theory for complex biological systems.

In more detail:

Bellomo & Delitala, 2008 wrote:This paper specifically refers to the above outlined complex biological system, namely the early stage of cancer onset and developments. The contents are strongly motivated by the fact that the scientific community is becoming increasingly aware that the great revolution of this century is going to be the mathematical formalization of phenomena in the life sciences, as well as the revolution of the past two centuries was the development of the mathematical approach in the physical sciences. It is a great challenge that will require the intellectual energy of scientists working in the field of mathematics and physics collaborating closely with biologists. The final target consists in joining the heuristic experimental approach, which is the traditional investigative method in the biological sciences, with the rigor induced by methods of mathematical and physical sciences.

The analysis of complex biological systems by a mathematical approach is motivated by top level biologists, and is documented in several recent papers appearing in journals dedicated to the life sciences. Among others, Antia et al. [9] analyze the role of mathematical models in biology, while May [87] analyzes relatively more general aspects of the use of mathematics in the biological sciences. This interesting paper looks for an equilibrium between a naive enthusiastic attitude and unreasonable scepticism. The beginning of the above cited paper captures the main conceptual ideas:

In the physical sciences, mathematical theory and experimental investigation have always marched together. Mathematics has been less intrusive in the life sciences, possibly because they have been until recently descriptive, lacking the invariance principles and fundamental natural constants of physics.

Remarkably similar concepts are proposed by Reed [102] according to the viewpoint of applied mathematicians. Once more, the author comments on the crucial difference between dealing with living matter and inert matter: essentially the lack of background models to support the derivation of mathematical equations. The brief note by Herrero [72] provides additional hints to develop a mathematical theory of complex biological systems.

Several hints to interdisciplinary approaches are offered by the paper by Hartwell et al. [71], which deeply analyze the conceptual differences between the difficulties in dealing with inert and living matter. Living systems are characterized by specific features absent in classical mechanics, as, for example, reproduction, competition, cell cycle, and the ability to communicate with other entities. Suggestions are not limited to general speculations, but provide a theory of functional modules defined as a discrete entity whose function is separable from those of other modules. As we shall see, this theory is mathematically developed through the approach of functional subsystems.

Focusing on cancer phenomena, it is important stressing that even at the very early stages the biological system under consideration appears with multiscale features: genes, cells and the early stage of tissues, corresponding to the molecular, cellular and tissue scale. The importance of examining the genetic mutations in cancer development is emphasized in Hanahan and Weinberg’s landmark paper [70], where the authors identify the critical changes in cell physiology that characterize malignant cancer growth. These changes—self-sufficiency in growth signals, insensitivity to anti-growth signals, evading apoptosis, limitless replicative potential, sustained angiogenesis, evading immune system attack, and tissue invasion and metastasis—incorporate some aspect of genetic mutation, gene expression, and evolutionary selection [105], leading to malignant progression. Although preliminary work on cancer modelling has included one or more of these hallmarks, few theoretical papers have addressed the mutations and selection which lead to the outward expression of these characteristics. Indeed, it is well accepted that the onset of cancer occurs through a sequence of genetic mutations and evolutionary selection leading to malignancy, a concept not yet well addressed through mathematical modelling.

Various papers and books, among others [13,52,64,67,69,88,90,92,97], suggest the development of a new game theory, e.g., evolutionary games, as a fundamental paradigm to deal with interactions between genes, cells and the outer environment including, of course, therapeutical actions and vaccines. This topic may act as a fundamental paradigm towards the development of a bio-mathematical theory of cancer, that is the very final aim of the interaction between the biological and mathematical sciences in the research field under consideration.

Oh wait, the authors describe how a model akin to the sort I've described above, but far more detailed in scope, is being used successfully to model the dynamics of early onset of cancers.

Here's the breakdown of the paper's sections provided by the authors themselves:

Bellomo & Delitala, 2008 wrote:– Section 2 deals with a description of the relevant phenomena that appear in the early stage of cancer. Namely, mutations, heterogeneous progression, and competition with the immune system. This section also analyzes the observation and representation scales and the identification of the variables suited to identify the biological state of the system at each scale. These variables are related to the concept of functional subsystems, that allows to reduce the complexity of the overall system into suitable subsystems, where active particle express the same biological function.

– Section 3 reports, with reference to the existing literature, about mathematical tools of the kinetic theory and stochastic games that can be used to model the various phenomena described in the preceding section. These tools include a method to link the two lower scales, namely the molecular to the cellular scale, i.e. from genotypic to phenotypic distributions.

– Section 4 shows how specific models can be derived referring to the above mathematical framework. Models are obtained by a detailed description of interactions at the cellular level based on the dynamics at the molecular level. A survey of various models known in the literature is given, while various hints to further developments are proposed.

– Section 5 deals with the modelling of space phenomena and, specifically, with the space-time scaling finalized to the derivation of tissue level models from the underlying cellular description. Different models, parabolic or hyperbolic, can be derived according to the influence of the dynamics at the molecular scale to cell dynamics and aggregation.

Further on, the authors remind us of this:

Bellomo & Delitala, 2008 wrote:Bearing all above in mind, let us consider the derivation of suitable mathematical structures that can be used for the modelling of large systems of active particles (whose activity is heterogeneously distributed) interacting within each functional-subsystem and with the particles of the other subsystems. These structures represent the mathematical background if the models reviewed in the next section. The overall evolution of the system is caused by interactions. Specifically, the following phenomena (interactions), focused on cancer modelling, are considered:

- Stochastic modification of the microscopic state of genes or cells due to binary interactions with other cells of the same or of different populations. These interactions are called conservative as they do not modify the number density of the interacting populations.

- Genetic alteration of cells which may either increase the progression of tumor cells or even generate, by clonal selection, new cells in a new population of cancer cells with higher level of malignancy.

- Proliferation or destruction of cells due to binary interactions with other cells of the same or of different populations.

- External actions, either therapeutical actions or other external agents, which modify the distribution function.

Of course, additional interactions can be considered, as it will be critically analyzed in the last section. However the analysis of this section is restricted to the above description, while the formal structure, which describes the evolution of fi , is obtained by the balance of particles in the elementary volume of the microscopic state. The balance is represented in the flow chart of Fig. 3.

After an extensive discussion of the relevant mathematics, the authors provide this:

Bellomo & Delitala, 2008 wrote:The above frameworks (9)–(10) and (12)–(13) can be used to derive specific models when a detailed analysis of the phenomenology of the system under consideration allows to model the various interaction terms that have been defined in this section. Actually, various models known in the literature have been derived following the above guidelines. A survey is given in the next section. On the other hand, it is well understood [25] that these terms should be delivered by the dynamics at the lower molecular scale [64]. This delicate matter is discussed in Section 4 and again in the last section.

"Atheist ideology" my fucking arse.

Stuff which can't be retro- or force-fitted into JJ's religious narrative = atheist ideology.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:If so, what would be part of communist ideology, in your view? I might well agree with you…Can you spell it out for me, in your view is there such a thing as communist ideology and if so, what exactly makes it an ideology?

Once again, I simply pointed out that it is not just exponents of a particular ideology that have an interest in the requisite entities. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand, JayJay?
Furthermore, given the number of times I have covered the underlying assertions of Marxism, whilst documenting the aetiology of doctrine centred world views, the fact that you don't know what those assertions are, despite my having expounded upon them frequently, testifies to your complete absence of even the most elementary level of diligence. Others here can find the requisite posts with a few mouse clicks. But since you need your homework doing for you, JayJay, the two assertions in question are:

[1] The Labour Theory of Value assertion, which asserts that the value of a commodity is exactly equal to the value of the labour required to produce it;

[2] The Surplus Value assertion, which asserts that any additional cost of a commodity is the product of capitalist exploitation of the producers thereof.

The big problem with Marxist ideology, is that the first of these assertions, the critical assertion upon which all else within the ideology is based, remains untested to this day. Not least because no one has defined a rigorous measure of 'value'. Price is a different matter, and for that matter, a different quantity. For example, the price I paid for a second hand digital camera, bears no relation to the value I place upon it, because someone else could have paid exactly the same price for it, but not bothered putting it to the use I have to document the insect fauna of my locality, and simply left it in a cupboard unused for long periods of time, save for the occasional holiday abroad. I regard that relatively low price I paid for that camera, to be pathetically inadequate as a measure of the value I place upon it, as an entomological recording tool. That camera has allowed me to do more than snap a few pretty pictures, it has allowed me to produce a thorough visual knowledge base of the local insect fauna, which now runs to something like 22,000 photographs.

Of course, that's a substantial problem with capitalist economics, namely, it concentrates upon price whilst frequently having no conception of value. But that's properly a subject for its own thread.

The big problem with Marxist ideology, is that in large part, it's nothing more than a financial religion. Of course, Marx was disturbingly prescient in pointing out the flaws inherent in capitalism, but his proposed solution was a non-solution. First, not everyone is equipped to manage even small businesses, let alone large ones, which is one of the reasons we pay the specialists who are, to do the job. The problem with capitalism is that if hands out too much largesse to the venal and ruthless, at the expense of those with less avaricious appetites, but stopping everyone from pursuing enterprise manifestly doesn't work. Of course, Marx's proposed "solution" sounded extremely persuasive to those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, particularly when they were suffering from ruthless, and in some cases, life-threatening exploitation, but instead of devising a way of rewarding ethical practice and punishing rampant piratical rapacity, Marx simply declared by fiat that the answer was to sweep the whole system away. I'm reminded at this juncture once again of the words of P. J. O'Rourke, when he said that any idiot can burn down the shit house, but it takes a skilled tradesman to install replacement plumbing. Marxist ideology is extremely appealing to lots of idiots who want to burn down the shit house, but offers bugger all coaching in the art of replacement plumbing.

I think this should be sufficientfor now, and if it isn't, then you really need to brush up on your basic comprehension.

More basic than the Marxist labour theory of value and of surplus value lay the workerist perceptions of the injustice of social inequalities and of the class system and economics as the means to analyse and rectify them. It wasn’t just idiots that Marxist explanation appealed to. I agree that a central flaw in Marxism was the notion that the human intellect could control an economy. Mind you that worked well enough during WWII, compared with the Russian performance in the previous war.

Ideology is a broader complex of beliefs than you make out. You haven’t thrown light on why you claim that ideology does not include highlighting some aspects of the world (e.g. social class)|and backgrounding others.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Atheist ideology is also expressed in assertions for example, that there is no progress in evolution.

Calilasseia wrote:This isn't an "assertion", JayJay, it's observed fact. There is NO teleology, NO externally applied goal arising from a magic sentience, nothing but "whatever works in the current environment".

Jayjay4547 wrote:
When I see that word “teleology” I reach for my smelling salts because it always seems to precede some overreaching argument beyond the remit of real observers.

Calilasseia wrote:But that's exactly what your fellow creationists routinely assert to be in place - a teleology enforced by their imaginary magic man in the sky. Once again, there is zero evidence for any of this.

I speak only for myself. And a central part of my thinking is about what the real observer can see. He can see progress in evolution without being able to see where it will lead.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:We speak familiarly of technological progress without using that word [teleology], but from observing the same system behavior that, in the longer term, has been observed from the fossil record. Fact is, the word “progress” is banished from evolution for fear that its use would encourage politically incorrect thinking amongst some.

Bollocks. It hasn't been "banished" by some decree or fiat, it's been demonstrated to be inapplicable by the data. Fucking learn this once and for all , will you?

I will question this “data” later in my response.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: atheism highlights reason over intuition.

I'm reminded here of the old aphorism about the process being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Keep ignoring the 90% perspiration whilst peddling more apologetic fabrications, why don't you?

On the other hand, perspiration without inspiration can just flounder energetically.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: The basic difference between atheists and theists is that theists see themselves as embedded in a hierarchy….Theists express this perception of the human condition in meditation, prayer, singing, dancing, great building and in narratives that are spiritual tools…Take “great building” that I cited above. The great cathedrals were spiritual tools

Actually, the only "experience" I have upon entering a cathedral, is to ask myself how much further we would be as a species, if we'd spent the money developing science instead of penis extensions for religion.

Science was developed by people who in many instances, worshipped in those same cathedrals. If people wanted to depict a penis extension they could have done that more simply than by building a cathedral. The experience that cathedrals are built for is actually something more searching and abstract. It’s a tragedy for Europe, that these cultural works should now be so blindly and contemptuously treated by the descendants of the builders.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:We can recapture some of the cathedral experience by filling a cathedral with a similar ceremony. Even in my country, with a poor copy of the great cathedrals and a ceremony in a different language, by people of a different race, some of that experience comes back.

Mass hysteria, anyone?

Certainly a group experience.

Calilasseia wrote: Ideologies only "live" as long as there are beings with intent, possessing the intent to carry them out.

Jayjay4547 wrote: In the same way, a biological organism only exists so long as it is made of living cells.

Calilasseia wrote: But, oh wait, the biosphere is littered with single celled organisms. Rather drives a tank battalion through your fatuous attempt to fabricate this bad analogy.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Even a single cell is a complex organism.

Calilasseia wrote:Modern ones benefiting from 3.5 billion years of evolution might be. This wasn't always the case. Oh, by the way, what about viruses?

Modern cells benefiting from what? From3.5 billion years of evolutionary progress? Yes. And viruses are themselves complex organisms, being made from DNA that plays out in a marvelous way when in the appropriate environment.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Basically we are talking about stacked elements in a living hierarchy.

Except that the "hierarchy" isn't what you think it is. pick up some biology textbooks.

Or pick up Arthur Koestler’s The ghost in the machine. . Or Smuts’ Holism and evolution

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The fact that one can have loyalty towards an ideology, identifies the ideology as greater than the individual.

Wrong. It merely demonstrates that adherents treat it as such. Non-adherents don't by definition.

Non adherents typically serve opposing ideologies.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
I don’t know that every philosopher on the planet would agree that your “rigorous formulation” of atheism is useful.

Steve Gimbel is an example of one who does. Because, wait for it, his deliberations on the subject were part of the inspiration for my doing so….Try this entire blog post. Read it in full. You can also check out his biography page [url=http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/philosophy/faculty/employee_detail.dot?empId=02000322920013381&pageTitle=Steve+Gimbel]at the University of Gettysburg[/i], where he's a tenured professor of philosophy. He has a number of published works to his credit, including works on the scientific method, Decartes and Einstein.

I read clear through that interesting blog post without finding support for your defining atheism as “not accepting unproven assertions as fact”. I asked him that, be interesting to see a reply.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: you dress up your definition pretentiously as “atheism, in its rigorous formulation”

Please, spare me the cheap ad homimens, especially given your sneering tone in past posts with respect to the matter of rigour. I present that definition as rigorous, because it's based upon the observable data.

It’s rich that you accuse me of ad hominem considering your posts. The pretentiousness in your claim to rigor is relevant to the discussion because you are fooling yourself that you are somehow above the messy trickiness of language (vide Gimbel) when actually your definition is linguistically manipulative. The closest one can actually get to a rigorous definition of atheism is more like the Wikipedia definition of someone who denies that God or any deity exists.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: Secondly your definition isn’t the accepted usual one

Not yet. But I haven't had the opportunity to disseminate my ideas in the relevant academic realm yet.

Yes, it’s a trial balloon like a lot of propositions on this forum.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:you say atheism consists of a refusal to accept unsupported assertions as fact “.

Actually, it consists of refusing to accept a specific class of assertions as fact, namely assertions by supernaturalists that their pet mythological entities are purportedly real. And, of course, all the subsidiary assertions supernaturalists erect on top of this assertionist house of cards. Do pay attention to the details..

You have often enough stated your proposition without that rider, so you haven’t always attended to your own details.

It’s true that the Christian faith has been pushed by the theist-atheist opposition into a rickety position about assertions of “historicity”. The spiritual value of a story like Noah’s Ark lies in its drawing of the relationship between man and what is greater than him; which is what man cannot learn about through experiment. Historically, Jews, Christians, and Moslems have had full access to that meaning but now there is anxiety that the story isn’t “historically true”. Both the atheist and fundamentalist resolutions lose something; the atheist loses the story as spiritual tool and the fundamentalist creates a tear line in his understanding of the world. My handling of the issue comes from the starting point belief that the observer (me) is embedded in social and biological hierarchies and that the most accessible visioning of my relationship with what is greater, is the one presented to me in my own language and my own cultural or religious tradition. I get encouragement in that from CG Jung; that one’s job is to work on what one has been given by the past of one’s culture and family. So I think of Noah’s story as the way my culture has painted the ceiling so to speak.

None of these positions about historicity are fully comfortable for me but I certainly reject the proposition that I accept “unsupported assertions as fact”. And a definition implying that I do, as non-atheist, is simply manipulative.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Thirdly and most important, you use this definition to stifle discussion of the complex of beliefs that atheists have built up

Bullshit. The reason your above assertion is bullshit, is because atheism, treated rigorously, involves DISPENSING WITH BELIEF ITSELF. Because belief, as supernaturalists routinely demonstrate, consists of nothing more than treating unsupported assertions as fact. Those of us who take this matter seriously, reject the idea that such a fatuous proces leads to substantive knowledge, and indeed, the observable evidence once again supports this.

I take this matter seriously and I find that plenty of scientists who have been Christian, have done well in building substantive knowledge. Newton for example.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:to make them feel comfortable with their belief

Another tiresome supernaturalist fabrication. Yawn. The whole "atheist belief" bullshit IS bullshit, for the reasons I've just provided. Because those of us who take the subject seriously, once again, DISPENSE WITH BELIEF ITSELF. We regard belief as a pathetic joke.

One of your beliefs is that a cathedral is a penis extension. Another is that there is no progress in evolution.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:and contemptuous towards people who believe otherwise.

You've missed the point by several light years as per usual. What we are "contemptuous" of is belief itself. We think it's a pathetic, inadequate substitute for real knowledge, one beloved of those who are too stupid or too indolent to do the hard work of finding out how reality actually works, as opposed to the sad fairy tales about this cobbled together by assorted ignorant, superstitious, pre-scientific humans.

Lazy pathetic stupid people like Newton.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your “definition” is just a tool of your ideology.

Bullshit and lies. It's the product of paying attention to the relevant observable data. Your pathetic attempt to misrepresent this as "ideology" is not only fatuous, but steamingly dishonest. Quite simply, I and others here think belief is the whole fucking problem! Because it involves treating fairy tales as fact.

One problem is that you sound exactly like an ideologue, with your language about opposition as “fatuous, steamingly dishonest”. That places you and any reader in a poor position for considering the issue rationally.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: I can only defend what I think [respecting “supernaturalism] which is that we live within the body of a naturalistic god; God appears to me to be Nature.

And this is where once and for all, your "atheist ideology" trope is utterly destroyed. The reason? Simple. Whilst I and others here might think your ideas are wrong, the worst you will ever face from the assorted posters here you defame with your "atheist ideology" trope, is the savaging of those ideas. Whereas, I know for a fact, that other supernaturalists will see that above explicit declaration of your ideas, and regard you not merely as being wrong, but as being a HERETIC. And we all know what happens when supernaturalists start talking about heresy, don't we? In short, JayJay, there are plenty of supernaturalists out there, who, upon reading the above words of yours, won't be content with addressing your expressed ideas - instead, they'll want to burn you at the stake. Or, in the case of Islamic State, want to subject you to a particularly brutal piece of cerebral topiary. In fact, quite a few of the more hardcore creationists in America will label you a pagan, for expressing the above idea. And we all know what they want to do to those who don't conform - if you have any doubts about this, JayJay, just look up the fascist horror that is Dominionism, a creed to which a good number of American creationist subscribe, a creed whose tenets, when you read them, should make you quake in your boots. These are people who want disobedient children stoning to death. These are people who want gay people summarily executed. These are people who think the hyper rich are entitled to treat the poor as slaves. These are people who think that if you are struck down with a serious illness, it means that their god hates you, and you deserve to die.

This, JayJay, is what "ideology" really means when taken to its logical conclusion. It means deciding that you have the power of life and death over others, because they don't conform. What's more, none are more suited to the business of deciding which human beings to round up and exterminate, than those ideologies purporting to tell adherents what a god wants them to do. In stark contrast, atheists such as myself simply want to stop these people from being in a position to turn their hideous desires into a nightmare reality. That's the difference, JayJay, we don't actually care too much what ridiculous ideas you choose to treat as fact, other than from the standpoint of exposing the absurdities contained therein, whereas quite a lot of your fellow supernaturalists, upon reading that sentence of yours above, will want to kill you. Preferably by means involving as much searing agony as they can possibly inflict. Because with those words above, JayJay, they will consider you a heretic, and as such, fit only to be exterminated. You might want to dwell on this, next time you think about peddling your tiresome and manifestly false "atheist ideology" fabrication, because unlike some of your fellow supernaturalists, we're only interested in discarding your ideas, whereas a lot of your fellow supernaturalists will want to discard you. By contrast, this is one of the reasons I and many other atheists reject ideology itself, because we're aware of the fulminating dangers it poses.

That tirade invites the response that, whatever some extreme sects might advocate, recent explicitly atheist governments have a bad record on human rights. I don’t defame atheists by talking about an atheist ideology. I use that concept to argue that atheism has affected the understanding and presentation of evolution. There is an extreme negative implication in my claim; that atheist influence has all been in the direction of encouraging a possible lock-down of the planetary ecology into a slave system. So in religious terms, atheists are doing the work of Satan to send us and all nature into perpetual hell. Pretty strong stuff. But I’m not saying you recognize the danger or are evil yourself. I would be just as guilty as you; if there is such an extreme danger, then why am I just talking about it in a chat room? All of us aren’t serious enough, although it’s utterly obvious that the human race is involved in a planetary-scale crisis. But I do hope that even in my unseriousness I can work towards some clearer picture of the human condition.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I splice that onto Christianity by saying that Nature is the hands of the Creator. That’s not part of Christian doctrine but neither do I insist on the wording; it’s enough for me that God is Great.

But that won't be enough for a lot of your fellow supernaturalists. Quite a lot of whom will come after you with the flaming pitchforks upon learning of your position. How does it feel, JayJay, knowing that you're actually safer among the atheists you sneer at and subject to ad hominems, than amongst other supernaturalists?

I’m not a supernaturalist, in years of posting I’ve never had a cross word from a fundamentalist and I see a lot of merit in genuine fundamentalism- i.e. when it is tied to a Christian lifestyle, not just an excuse to jibe. I don’t sneer at other posters or indulge in ad hominem, though under extreme pressure from your own language. And I’m not even safe from your vitriol. It affects my mental and maybe physical health; I can only write of these things in an hour or two in the early mornings.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I deny that I am a “supernaturalist”; that word implies a belief in ghosts and ectoplasm.

Well for the purpose of this part of the discourse, and my immediately preceding paragraphs, we'll treat this term as referring generically to anyone who accepts mythological assertions as fact, even if those assertions don't necessarily involve fantastic magic entities, just so that you feel comfortable.

Thanks but that won’t do either, I don’t accept mythological assertions as fact; I accept the stories in the Bible as numinous, not as fact.

Calilasseia wrote:
But, whilst providing you with this piece of largesse, you might want to take note of the fact that a lot of other supernaturalists, are supernaturalists red in tooth and claw, so to speak, fully signed up to the idea that magic entities exist, and in the more florid cases, even resurrect the ridiculous vision of the world extant in mediaeval times. These are people who hate viscerally the idea that testable natural processes can provide an explanation for anything, who want the universe and its contents to be subject to the dominion of their doctrines and the assertions contained therein, and who entertain such fatuous notions as the idea that diseases are caused by "demons". Strange as it may seem to you, with a somewhat comfortable Anglican background, there are such people about, and in America, they have money and political connections that they are using, to try and make their hideous mediaeval world view rise to an anachronistic hegemony. These people would be amongst the first to put you to death as a pagan and a heretic, for expressing the views you've expounded above, and they would take pleasure from doing this. Sordid, squalid, sadistic pleasure. Let that thought dwell for a while in your mind, JayJay, that quite a few of the people who describe themselves as "Christians", are actually Torquemada wannabees hoping to become the torturers on behalf of the theocracy that is their bizarre, outré and frankly psychotic masturbation fantasy. America is littered with these people.

Well I rather like Americans generally. I was brought up partly amongst White, Afrikaans Nationalist, Dutch Reformed Church, Boers. Who also I rather like, though my own positions on many issues have been different. I imagine them as a bit similar to Southern Baptists in the USA. Guess I’m not a good hater.

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:And there are millions of Christians who think somewhat along my lines: the very people whose position is adjacent culturally, to that of atheists. So your insistence on “supernaturalist” instead of “theist” is part of atheist ideology to build the wall between your belief and adjacent ones.

But as I've just explained, JayJay, you and these millions of Christians aren't the only game in town. The fun part being, of course, that I've simply described the horrors awaiting you at the hands of some of the other "Christians" currently extant. I suspect that the hatred you would experience from the assorted head-choppers of Islamic State would make even the creepy, fascist Dominionists look tame.

So you say but I’m making a serious point that your demonizing of Christians based on extremism when the kind of Christianity you might possibly be attracted to is being discussed, is part of your ideology..

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not quite true though, that I can only defend what I think; I also live in amity with Christian fundamentalists and I am prepared to defend their practices but as something appreciated not as what I believe.

Well some of their practices I do NOT defend in the slightest. Such as murdering doctors who work for reproductive health clinics. Or trying to pervert science education by forcing mythology into science classes. Or acting as a drag anchor on medical science for specious, fabricated reasons. When those practices have malign consequences for other human beings, not to mention society as a whole, that's when I say "stop".

You say a lot more than “stop” and to less blameworthy targets. For example you say that a cathedral built by your ancestors is a penis extension.

Part 3 follows later.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
Ideology is a broader complex of beliefs than you make out.

Once again debunking your own dishonest assertion that atheism is an ideology, since atheism doesn't even constitute a single belief, let alone multiple.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I speak only for myself. And a central part of my thinking is about what the real observer can see. He can see progress in evolution without being able to see where it will lead.

Evidence Jayjay, not assertions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:We speak familiarly of technological progress without using that word [teleology], but from observing the same system behavior that, in the longer term, has been observed from the fossil record. Fact is, the word “progress” is banished from evolution for fear that its use would encourage politically incorrect thinking amongst some.

Bollocks. It hasn't been "banished" by some decree or fiat, it's been demonstrated to be inapplicable by the data. Fucking learn this once and for all , will you?

I will question this “data” later in my response.

Blind dismissal and counterfactual assertion will get you nowhere Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: The basic difference between atheists and theists is that theists see themselves as embedded in a hierarchy….Theists express this perception of the human condition in meditation, prayer, singing, dancing, great building and in narratives that are spiritual tools…Take “great building” that I cited above. The great cathedrals were spiritual tools

Actually, the only "experience" I have upon entering a cathedral, is to ask myself how much further we would be as a species, if we'd spent the money developing science instead of penis extensions for religion.

Science was developed by people who in many instances, worshipped in those same cathedrals.

Despite their religion, not because of it. Correlation =/= causation Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote: If people wanted to depict a penis extension they could have done that more simply than by building a cathedral.

Not with the same result. The essence of this contest is to do everything bigger, better and more espensive than the next guy.

Jayjay4547 wrote: The experience that cathedrals are built for is actually something more searching and abstract.

Just as often it's to display the wealth and power of the church.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s a tragedy for Europe, that these cultural works should now be so blindly and contemptuously treated by the descendants of the builders.

Whine some more Jayjay, I'm sure it'll help your position.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:We can recapture some of the cathedral experience by filling a cathedral with a similar ceremony. Even in my country, with a poor copy of the great cathedrals and a ceremony in a different language, by people of a different race, some of that experience comes back.

Mass hysteria, anyone?

Certainly a group experience.

Failure to adress the point being made has been noted.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
Non adherents typically serve opposing ideologies.

Only if you completely fail to understand what non-adherent means.
Or wish to employ disengenous ignorance.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
I don’t know that every philosopher on the planet would agree that your “rigorous formulation” of atheism is useful.

Steve Gimbel is an example of one who does. Because, wait for it, his deliberations on the subject were part of the inspiration for my doing so….Try this entire blog post. Read it in full. You can also check out his biography page [url=http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/philosophy/faculty/employee_detail.dot?empId=02000322920013381&pageTitle=Steve+Gimbel]at the University of Gettysburg[/i], where he's a tenured professor of philosophy. He has a number of published works to his credit, including works on the scientific method, Decartes and Einstein.

I read clear through that interesting blog post without finding support for your defining atheism as “not accepting unproven assertions as fact”. I asked him that, be interesting to see a reply.

We'd be interested in you actually clearly defining this supposed atheist ideology and actually present evidence for it's existence.
So you're hadly in a position to demand evidence from other people.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: you dress up your definition pretentiously as “atheism, in its rigorous formulation”

Please, spare me the cheap ad homimens, especially given your sneering tone in past posts with respect to the matter of rigour. I present that definition as rigorous, because it's based upon the observable data.

It’s rich that you accuse me of ad hominem considering your posts.

It isn't. Cali hasn't posted a single ad-hominem in this thread Jayjay.
Stop lying.

Jayjay4547 wrote: The closest one can actually get to a rigorous definition of atheism is more like the Wikipedia definition of someone who denies that God or any deity exists.

Utter bollocks, asserted blindly, without actualy rational arguments.
Atheism means literally what the word states:
a- = without
theism = belief in the existence of one or more deities.
It's being without the belief that deities exist.
Not believing no deities exist and certainly not denying that any deities exist.
So stop trying to regurgitate your disengenuoussdefinition. It's been eviscerated thouroughly and repeatedly for the arsewater that it is.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:you say atheism consists of a refusal to accept unsupported assertions as fact “.

Actually, it consists of refusing to accept a specific class of assertions as fact, namely assertions by supernaturalists that their pet mythological entities are purportedly real. And, of course, all the subsidiary assertions supernaturalists erect on top of this assertionist house of cards. Do pay attention to the details..

You have often enough stated your proposition without that rider, so you haven’t always attended to your own details.

Anyone who'd realise what the word atheism is made up of would realise that specification.

Jayjay4547 wrote: It’s true that the Christian faith has been pushed by the theist-atheist opposition into a rickety position about assertions of “historicity”. The spiritual value of a story like Noah’s Ark lies in its drawing of the relationship between man and what is greater than him; which is what man cannot learn about through experiment.

Sophistic nonsense.
The story of Noah isn't a parable, it's supposed to have literally happened.
You don't get to retroactively declare parts of the bible to be figurative, because it has been demonstrated to be impossible on a factual level.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Historically, Jews, Christians, and Moslems have had full access to that meaning but now there is anxiety that the story isn’t “historically true”.

Because it isn't.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Both the atheist and fundamentalist resolutions lose something; the atheist loses the story as spiritual tool

This begs the questions that:
A. We needed that story as a spiritual tool.
B. We used that story as a spiritual tool.
Both are false.
The story of Noah is the story of an incompetent creature who throws a temper tantrum as the result of his own incompetence.

Jayjay4547 wrote:My handling of the issue comes from the starting point belief that the observer (me) is embedded in social and biological hierarchies and that the most accessible visioning of my relationship with what is greater, is the one presented to me in my own language and my own cultural or religious tradition.

We're well aware of your cherised fantasies, there's no need to endlessly regurgitate them. It won't magically make them true.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I get encouragement in that from CG Jung; that one’s job is to work on what one has been given by the past of one’s culture and family. So I think of Noah’s story as the way my culture has painted the ceiling so to speak.

Sophistic nonsense.

Jayjay4547 wrote: None of these positions about historicity are fully comfortable for me but I certainly reject the proposition that I accept “unsupported assertions as fact”.

Appeal to emotion fallacy and counterfactual assertion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Thirdly and most important, you use this definition to stifle discussion of the complex of beliefs that atheists have built up

Bullshit. The reason your above assertion is bullshit, is because atheism, treated rigorously, involves DISPENSING WITH BELIEF ITSELF. Because belief, as supernaturalists routinely demonstrate, consists of nothing more than treating unsupported assertions as fact. Those of us who take this matter seriously, reject the idea that such a fatuous proces leads to substantive knowledge, and indeed, the observable evidence once again supports this.

I take this matter seriously and I find that plenty of scientists who have been Christian, have done well in building substantive knowledge. Newton for example.

And we're back to the correlation =/= causation fallacy.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:to make them feel comfortable with their belief

Another tiresome supernaturalist fabrication. Yawn. The whole "atheist belief" bullshit IS bullshit, for the reasons I've just provided. Because those of us who take the subject seriously, once again, DISPENSE WITH BELIEF ITSELF. We regard belief as a pathetic joke.

One of your beliefs is that a cathedral is a penis extension.

It's not a belief, it's a historical fact.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Another is that there is no progress in evolution.

Jayjay this is your disenenguous assertion, not a fact.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:and contemptuous towards people who believe otherwise.

You've missed the point by several light years as per usual. What we are "contemptuous" of is belief itself. We think it's a pathetic, inadequate substitute for real knowledge, one beloved of those who are too stupid or too indolent to do the hard work of finding out how reality actually works, as opposed to the sad fairy tales about this cobbled together by assorted ignorant, superstitious, pre-scientific humans.

Lazy pathetic stupid people like Newton.

Completely failing to adress the point by straw-manning your interlocutor.
But then that's par for the course with you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your “definition” is just a tool of your ideology.

Bullshit and lies. It's the product of paying attention to the relevant observable data. Your pathetic attempt to misrepresent this as "ideology" is not only fatuous, but steamingly dishonest. Quite simply, I and others here think belief is the whole fucking problem! Because it involves treating fairy tales as fact.

One problem is that you sound exactly like an ideologue, with your language about opposition as “fatuous, steamingly dishonest”.

Thus Jayjay boldly asserted, thus it shall be forever more.
Stop pulling shite out of your arse if you want to be taken seriously Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote: That places you and any reader in a poor position for considering the issue rationally.

Oh look blind pre-dismissal of any criticism by arbitrary standards.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: I can only defend what I think [respecting “supernaturalism] which is that we live within the body of a naturalistic god; God appears to me to be Nature.

And this is where once and for all, your "atheist ideology" trope is utterly destroyed. The reason? Simple. Whilst I and others here might think your ideas are wrong, the worst you will ever face from the assorted posters here you defame with your "atheist ideology" trope, is the savaging of those ideas. Whereas, I know for a fact, that other supernaturalists will see that above explicit declaration of your ideas, and regard you not merely as being wrong, but as being a HERETIC. And we all know what happens when supernaturalists start talking about heresy, don't we? In short, JayJay, there are plenty of supernaturalists out there, who, upon reading the above words of yours, won't be content with addressing your expressed ideas - instead, they'll want to burn you at the stake. Or, in the case of Islamic State, want to subject you to a particularly brutal piece of cerebral topiary. In fact, quite a few of the more hardcore creationists in America will label you a pagan, for expressing the above idea. And we all know what they want to do to those who don't conform - if you have any doubts about this, JayJay, just look up the fascist horror that is Dominionism, a creed to which a good number of American creationist subscribe, a creed whose tenets, when you read them, should make you quake in your boots. These are people who want disobedient children stoning to death. These are people who want gay people summarily executed. These are people who think the hyper rich are entitled to treat the poor as slaves. These are people who think that if you are struck down with a serious illness, it means that their god hates you, and you deserve to die.

This, JayJay, is what "ideology" really means when taken to its logical conclusion. It means deciding that you have the power of life and death over others, because they don't conform. What's more, none are more suited to the business of deciding which human beings to round up and exterminate, than those ideologies purporting to tell adherents what a god wants them to do. In stark contrast, atheists such as myself simply want to stop these people from being in a position to turn their hideous desires into a nightmare reality. That's the difference, JayJay, we don't actually care too much what ridiculous ideas you choose to treat as fact, other than from the standpoint of exposing the absurdities contained therein, whereas quite a lot of your fellow supernaturalists, upon reading that sentence of yours above, will want to kill you. Preferably by means involving as much searing agony as they can possibly inflict. Because with those words above, JayJay, they will consider you a heretic, and as such, fit only to be exterminated. You might want to dwell on this, next time you think about peddling your tiresome and manifestly false "atheist ideology" fabrication, because unlike some of your fellow supernaturalists, we're only interested in discarding your ideas, whereas a lot of your fellow supernaturalists will want to discard you. By contrast, this is one of the reasons I and many other atheists reject ideology itself, because we're aware of the fulminating dangers it poses.

That tirade

Cali has expressed no anger, so your classification of his post as a tirade is nothing but a disengenuous appeal to emotion.

Jayjay4547 wrote: invites the response that, whatever some extreme sects might advocate,

Atheism isn't a religion or otherwise coherent group, ergo there's no such thing as sects.

Jayjay4547 wrote: recent explicitly atheist governments

There's no such thing.
Governments don't have beliefs about gods.
There's secular governments, but that's got nothing inherently to do with atheism, as many theists are secularists.

Jayjay4547 wrote:have a bad record on human rights.

As do men with moustaches.
Really Jayjay this desprate attempt to link atrocities to atheism has already been exhaustively rebutted and refuted years before you brought it up on this forum.
Stop embarassing yourself by mindlessly repeating it, especially since it's already been pointed out to you how your accusation fails.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I don’t defame atheists by talking about an atheist ideology.

No, you attempt to attack atheist, by disengenuously claiming they have a shared ideology, even after it's been clearly explained to you why that's nonsense.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I use that concept

Stop lying Jayjay.
You're using a blind assertion.
You have presented no coherent concept, let alone evidence for it's existence.

Jayjay4547 wrote:to argue that atheism has affected the understanding and presentation of evolution.

Something which you've utterly failed to so far.
All your misrepresentations, lies and blind assertions have been exposed as such.

Jayjay4547 wrote:There is an extreme negative implication in my claim; that atheist influence has all been in the direction of encouraging a possible lock-down of the planetary ecology into a slave system.

Still ludicrous word salad, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So in religious terms, atheists are doing the work of Satan to send us and all nature into perpetual hell.

More arsewater.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Pretty strong fantastical stuff.

FIFY.

Jayjay4547 wrote:But I’m not saying you recognize the danger or are evil yourself.

No, just dishonestly persisting that we have an ideology, which we don't.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I would be just as guilty as you; if there is such an extreme danger, then why am I just talking about it in a chat room? All of us aren’t serious enough,

Pro-tip: don't speak for other people, especially if you don't know them.

Jayjay4547 wrote:although it’s utterly obvious that the human race is involved in a planetary-scale crisis. But I do hope that even in my unseriousness I can work towards some clearer picture of the human condition.

Well, if you could get your dishonest behaviour out of the way and actually read and adress the criticism of your claims, you just might.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I splice that onto Christianity by saying that Nature is the hands of the Creator. That’s not part of Christian doctrine but neither do I insist on the wording; it’s enough for me that God is Great.

But that won't be enough for a lot of your fellow supernaturalists. Quite a lot of whom will come after you with the flaming pitchforks upon learning of your position. How does it feel, JayJay, knowing that you're actually safer among the atheists you sneer at and subject to ad hominems, than amongst other supernaturalists?

I’m not a supernaturalist, in years of posting I’ve never had a cross word from a fundamentalist and I see a lot of merit in genuine fundamentalism- i.e. when it is tied to a Christian lifestyle, not just an excuse to jibe.

Then you are a supernaturalist as there's nothing to Christianity that's original or requires Christianity to exist.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I don’t sneer at other posters or indulge in ad hominem,

You manifestly do. This entire thread is one big attempt of yours to sling ad-hominems at atheists and sneer at them.

Jayjay4547 wrote: though under extreme pressure from your own language.

Drop the persecution card jayjay. It's pathetic.

Jayjay4547 wrote: And I’m not even safe from your vitriol.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It affects my mental and maybe physical health; I can only write of these things in an hour or two in the early mornings.

No-one's forcing you to contribute to this site.
1. Cali has not posted a single personal remark.
2. Attacking your claims/ideas =/= attacking you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:
But, whilst providing you with this piece of largesse, you might want to take note of the fact that a lot of other supernaturalists, are supernaturalists red in tooth and claw, so to speak, fully signed up to the idea that magic entities exist, and in the more florid cases, even resurrect the ridiculous vision of the world extant in mediaeval times. These are people who hate viscerally the idea that testable natural processes can provide an explanation for anything, who want the universe and its contents to be subject to the dominion of their doctrines and the assertions contained therein, and who entertain such fatuous notions as the idea that diseases are caused by "demons". Strange as it may seem to you, with a somewhat comfortable Anglican background, there are such people about, and in America, they have money and political connections that they are using, to try and make their hideous mediaeval world view rise to an anachronistic hegemony. These people would be amongst the first to put you to death as a pagan and a heretic, for expressing the views you've expounded above, and they would take pleasure from doing this. Sordid, squalid, sadistic pleasure. Let that thought dwell for a while in your mind, JayJay, that quite a few of the people who describe themselves as "Christians", are actually Torquemada wannabees hoping to become the torturers on behalf of the theocracy that is their bizarre, outré and frankly psychotic masturbation fantasy. America is littered with these people.

Well I rather like Americans generally. I was brought up partly amongst White, Afrikaans Nationalist, Dutch Reformed Church, Boers. Who also I rather like, though my own positions on many issues have been different. I imagine them as a bit similar to Southern Baptists in the USA. Guess I’m not a good hater.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:And there are millions of Christians who think somewhat along my lines: the very people whose position is adjacent culturally, to that of atheists. So your insistence on “supernaturalist” instead of “theist” is part of atheist ideology to build the wall between your belief and adjacent ones.

But as I've just explained, JayJay, you and these millions of Christians aren't the only game in town. The fun part being, of course, that I've simply described the horrors awaiting you at the hands of some of the other "Christians" currently extant. I suspect that the hatred you would experience from the assorted head-choppers of Islamic State would make even the creepy, fascist Dominionists look tame.

So you say but I’m making a serious point that your demonizing of Christians based on extremism when the kind of Christianity you might possibly be attracted to is being discussed, is part of your ideology..

Even if it was, it would only be part of Cali's 'ideology'.
Not atheism.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not quite true though, that I can only defend what I think; I also live in amity with Christian fundamentalists and I am prepared to defend their practices but as something appreciated not as what I believe.

Well some of their practices I do NOT defend in the slightest. Such as murdering doctors who work for reproductive health clinics. Or trying to pervert science education by forcing mythology into science classes. Or acting as a drag anchor on medical science for specious, fabricated reasons. When those practices have malign consequences for other human beings, not to mention society as a whole, that's when I say "stop".

You say a lot more than “stop” and to less blameworthy targets. For example you say that a cathedral built by your ancestors is a penis extension.

Because it evidentially is.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Part 3 follows later.

Which will undoubtely contain more lies, misrepresentations and rectal matter.