Minor side point to those who keep insisting that only humans think this or that...

There is an old saying that many pseudo-historians and people who should be arrested for impersonating historians keep repeating, which goes

"History is Written by the Victors." The one positive intent of that bit of tripe, is to encourage people to inspect who has written the particular history in question, and to take their bias into account. The reason why the saying itself is actually destructive of wisdom, is that it walks everyone right on past the most important fact.

History is written by the people who write history and publish it.

The same wisdom applies to making deductions about what creatures do and don't "think" or "believe" or "imagine." The fact that they don't write up billboards or file formal complaints with the local constabulary, doesn't mean they all sublimely pleased about how the rest of us are behaving. And I can't count the number of times I have witnessed people in power declaring that certain fellow humans must be sanguine about their activities, simply because they weren't, at that moment, conducting an organized assault against them.

Something like that. And yes, although the history of battles is written mostly by the victors, the losers in history write their version too, mostly claiming it was the victors' fault that they appear to have lost the battle, but they actually won. It's up to the researcher to examine all the evidence in as unbiased way as possible, and then to report on the findings, even comparing the versions. When it comes to animals (including human ones), I think we should judge from the point of view that they actually know and understand exactly what we're doing, and our actions should be based on how we want them to perceive us, and our actions.

That's how i become an atheist. Researching and reading everything I could get my hands on of both sides of the argument, including reading the babble twice. Any thinking person would come to my conclusion that God is no more than myth and superstitions.

angelo wrote:That's how i become an atheist. Researching and reading everything I could get my hands on of both sides of the argument, including reading the babble twice. Any thinking person would come to my conclusion that God is no more than myth and superstitions.

The 'god' you're talking about is a character in a particular story, one that's not difficult to dismiss. Your work isn't done, yet, not by a long shot. If you're still walking around thinking of inanimate natural processes as possessing 'creative forces', and you don't know how to articulate that you're speaking in metaphor (or cannot bear to), then you really haven't finished developing your 'atheism'. God isn't just a character in a story; god is a way of thinking about the world, and you have to make it clear to people that you're not still thinking about the world in a way that isn't done with god, yet.

A character in a favorite film of mine said something like "we may be done with the past, but the past isn't done with us." Elsewhere in the film, someone sang, "it's not going to stop... 'til you wise up".

Cito di Pense wrote:

angelo wrote:That's how i become an atheist. Researching and reading everything I could get my hands on of both sides of the argument, including reading the babble twice. Any thinking person would come to my conclusion that God is no more than myth and superstitions.

The 'god' you're talking about is a character in a particular story, one that's not difficult to dismiss. Your work isn't done, yet, not by a long shot. If you're still walking around thinking of inanimate natural processes as possessing 'creative forces', and you don't know how to articulate that you're speaking in metaphor (or cannot bear to), then you really haven't finished developing your 'atheism'. God isn't just a character in a story; god is a way of thinking about the world, and you have to make it clear to people that you're not still thinking about the world in a way that isn't done with god, yet.

A character in a favorite film of mine said something like "we may be done with the past, but the past isn't done with us." Elsewhere in the film, someone sang, "it's not going to stop... 'til you wise up".

Laurel & Hardy?

On a serious note, I agree. There's more to dismissing God than dismissing a literal interpretation of a text written a long time ago by people of a particular mindset. If that's atheism then it's naive atheism.

jamest wrote:
On a serious note, I agree. There's more to dismissing God than dismissing a literal interpretation of a text written a long time ago by people of a particular mindset. If that's atheism then it's naive atheism.

I'm not telling you to dismiss god. I'm just telling you the steps you can go through to do it. But you have to do the steps. It's very easy for me to dismiss god. I've shown you in umpty-ump posts. If you want to convince yourself of god, that's easy to do, because you do it after the fact of already believing in god. If you don't believe in god, it's impossible to make yourself believe in god, and you have to wait for that quintessential moment. I know, that already happened for you. Whatever it is you're calling 'god', you can't explain it to anyone else.

I mean, James: You keep telling us there's more, but you never say what more there is. If you can't figure out what to do with "thinking that you're thinking", then there's probably no way for you to do the steps. It's not a recursion. You can only go in one level. After that, you're thinking about what you told yourself you were thinking, but you don't seem to doubt that you know exactly what that was, given that you can only try to remember what it was.

I don't call my point of view 'atheism'. I simply point out that it's not worth the bother of developing my personal theology. Lots of folks here will tell you that they simply lack 'belief in gods', but what I think that really means is that they don't do theology.

Your head is as warped as mine, Cito.

jamest wrote:Your head is as warped as mine, Cito.

And what's that supposed to signify? I'm not in a competition with you, unless you think it's a competition between your avowal that 'god' signifies and my avowal that 'god' does not signify. What I said in the previous post is, approximately, if it doesn't signify, you can't make it signify by surrounding it with more words that don't signify. If it does signify, the surrounding words are superfluous.

You can make up whatever you want 'god' to signify, and so can the next guy, and it will not obviously be the same as the one you picked, unless you go back to identifying it with some character in a story book. Then you both point at the book and say that 'god' is the character named 'god' in that book. Whoop de doo. Can fifty billion flies all be wrong?

The people who pull your leg with 'perennial philosophy', instead of reifying it as a character in a story, memorize it as a set piece in a bunch of metaphor.

Cito di Pense wrote:

jamest wrote:Your head is as warped as mine, Cito.

And what's that supposed to signify?

Nothing nasty. You're at the opposite end of the free-thinking scale to me, but your thoughts are no less controversial or vague than my own.

I'm not in a competition with you, unless you think it's a competition between your avowal that 'god' signifies and my avowal that 'god' does not signify. What I said in the previous post is, approximately, if it doesn't signify, you can't make it signify by surrounding it with more words that don't signify. If it does signify, the surrounding words are superfluous.

To signify, or not to signify, that is the question.

This is all a bit deep for this crew, I suspect.

jamest wrote:
This is all a bit deep for this crew, I suspect.

Indeed.

Though I don't think it's terribly shallow of mind to see a pile of bullshit and decide it isn't worth wading into to see how deep it goes. Being satisfied with a superficial experience of bullshit says nothing about a person's capacity for intellectual depth.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

jamest wrote:
This is all a bit deep for this crew, I suspect.

Indeed.

Though I don't think it's terribly shallow of mind to see a pile of bullshit and decide it isn't worth wading into to see how deep it goes. Being satisfied with a superficial experience of bullshit says nothing about a person's capacity for intellectual depth.

There is no smugness justified in shallowness, where these particular depths are concerned.

... Spare me the spiel about the shallow-minded being qualified to judge the bullshit of life. It stinks more than the FUA forbids me to say.

jamest wrote:

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

jamest wrote:
This is all a bit deep for this crew, I suspect.

Indeed.

Though I don't think it's terribly shallow of mind to see a pile of bullshit and decide it isn't worth wading into to see how deep it goes. Being satisfied with a superficial experience of bullshit says nothing about a person's capacity for intellectual depth.

There is no smugness justified in shallowness, where these particular depths are concerned.

... Spare me the spiel about the shallow-minded being qualified to judge the bullshit of life. It stinks more than the FUA forbids me to say.

Tell me more about smugness.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

jamest wrote:

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

jamest wrote:
This is all a bit deep for this crew, I suspect.

Indeed.

Though I don't think it's terribly shallow of mind to see a pile of bullshit and decide it isn't worth wading into to see how deep it goes. Being satisfied with a superficial experience of bullshit says nothing about a person's capacity for intellectual depth.

There is no smugness justified in shallowness, where these particular depths are concerned.

... Spare me the spiel about the shallow-minded being qualified to judge the bullshit of life. It stinks more than the FUA forbids me to say.

Tell me more about smugness.

Smugness is a pleasant feeling, but only people like myself should experience it.

Anything else?

Nah. I think we both agree that you've cornered the market on smug.

Signifyin' Monkey, stay up in your tree.
You are always lyin' and signifyin'
But you better not monkey with me.

We watched a television show yesterday, the subject matter of which was the fourteenth century and the behavior of the people living in around a cathedral town, with the prior of the abbey being the arbiter of what was and what wasn't acceptable to his interpretation of God. Just looking at how psychopaths have been, and still are, in positions of authority over judgments in religion and deciders of what people should be doing, we discussed the concept of God and how evil (for want of a better word) the rules of the Bible actually are, when viewed in this sort of graphic demonstration: burning "witches", branding women, not men for "fornication", handing women over to despicable men as goods to be traded, putting children to work, punishing the mentally ill as being "possessed" and so on. How can any modern person, viewing how fortunate we are to have protection under the rules for human rights, gender equality, non-discrimination based on skin colour, or ethnicity, still believe that the god of the Bible actually exists, and condones the behaviours of people in the past?

I know modern Christians certainly say that that's not what Jesus said, but these were people handing out judgements based on what they thought Jesus wanted them to do. They weren't old world Old Testament fanatics, these were priests in Christianity. So either they were not carrying the correct message (which seems odd to me given that they were still in the process of formulating the message), or modern Christians are not carrying the correct message because they adhere to modern rules. It seems to me that extremists are the people who are obeying the actual rules of the Bible, and modern Christians are making up new ones.

If you conclude that God doesn't exist, based on our modern world, with modern laws for behavior, it makes life a little easier for everyone, and it allows for technological and scientific advancement that can only be better for future generations.

jamest wrote: You're at the opposite end of the free-thinking scale to me, but your thoughts are no less controversial or vague than my own.

I agree with you that we're both free thinkers. Now...

It sounds as if you're trying desperately to quantify something. That's not like you at all.

However, we can try to proceed. How many sets of robes and sandals have you given away, lately? And how many were binned?

Aggie much like Islam today. They are only 600 years behind.

Cito di Pense wrote:I mean, James: You keep telling us there's more, but you never say what more there is.

That's kind of the whole point, Jamest argument is basically an appeal to fear by telling people "you're missing out." And we all know how much religion loves fear. Jamest doesn't want to understand or can't understand why people don't think they're missing out on "more" and don't need to.

Jamest makes claims to knowledge, but he can't show what he knows.
And if you can't show it or it can't be shown, then you don't know it. You're just making shit up.