Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:
And for all I know, DIRTY_WATER may be an empty set.

Speculating about what may be going on is not philosophy, it's not journalism, it's not theology, and it sure is not science. If you don't want to situate your discourse anywhere, you don't have to, but it's going to be a lonely year for you away from your science fiction fan club.

I wasn't speculating about anything. I was making a specific and accurate statement about a specific state of my ignorance.

Agrippina wrote:It's a nonsense acronym, please stop using it.

I'll need a rational reason why I should comply with your request before I will.

John Platko wrote:

lyingcheat wrote:

John Platko wrote: Given the number of religions and varied methodology used to gather "religious evidence" (RE) it's hard to come up with a concise and complete definition. But I'll give it a go:

Element e belongs to the set ALL_RE, which consists of all RE, if e is deemed to be RE by any person claiming or considered to be religious.

This ^^^ definition is circular. It's a, no doubt typically, meaningless example of itself asserted by someone who fits the definition.

Though I note it would also allow every bizarre delusion ever uttered by any psychotic in the grip of devout religious mania to be considered 'religious evidence', regardless of the apparent theme.


Too too silly.

Absurd, what is circular? All I did is define terms, I haven't used them in an argument yet. I.e. There's no argument to be circular!

You have worse problems than that. You're basically defining a term to be the term that people use when they use that term. That's pretty circular right there; worse yet, you've supplied no further documentation that the set of people who actually use the term as you define it is not an empty set. If you use it yourself, more power to you.

Regina wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:Because to understand what I mean one must understand the many ways text communicates and it's inefficient for me to explain the many way text communicates in a comment block. And besides, the expert I pointed you to is a world class professional at teaching it.

It may be the case that text communicates in many different ways, but you don't seem eager to permit readers to interpret your text in many different ways. You have piled up the bullshit so high and steep on this one that the angle of repose for bullshit heaps has been exceeded, and your ideas are now being inundated by your bullshit.

Naturally, one of the interpretations of text so coated in bullshit that nothing else shows through is that it is bullshit through and through. And that's some tough shit, John.

It case there's some confusion about it, everyone is free to interpret my words anyway you like. You are however not free to misquote me at will, at least not here. And I'm good with that.

You are the best, but alas, nobody is perfect. Misquoting is very narrowly defined.

Yes I get that. As long as we're all trying our best .....

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:[All I want to establish is, are the doctors involved in the medical review of the cases at Lourdes working well within standard medical practice for what their tasked with determining. i.e. type of illness before, state of patient after, can a cause of recovery be determined.

These doctors are attending to cases from a particular locality for which no epidemiological factors in the art of medicine are being considered. These doctors are not following standard medical practice in pondering whether cause of recovery can or cannot be determined.

Stop bullshitting us, John. Your pursuit of religious apologetics is obvious. You've been repeatedly corrected on the definition of 'standard medical practice', and continue to pursue your erroneous assertions.

We'll by all means clue me in. What exactly is standard medical practice to determine a specific patients medical illness, current state of health, and cause of change? And what peer review process comes into play if there is any doubt about an individual doctors performance in any of those steps. A link to a non biased source of this information should be easy for you to provide. Where is it? do I have to post it yet again?

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:
Reviewing only cases from Lourdes could never constitute a clinical trial for medical science.

I didn't say anything about a clinical trial. What the doctors do for the specific cases at Lourdes is a clinical case review- and that's different than a clinical trial.

All this means is that if you are trying to represent the participation of physicians at Lourdes as a scientific investigation, you've been offered arguments as to why that would be a misrepresentation.

If you want to piggyback your woo-belief on what you think are scientific principles, knock yourself out. I don't think anyone here seriously expects you to understand the folly of that. Your particular brand of woo throws a fog over every point you've tried to make by devoting to it an attention span of microseconds. The whole point is not to confront the dishonest fogging that you are engaged in post by tedious post.

You clearly have the opinion that your brand of woo ought not to be mocked for what it is. Cry me a river, John.

Facts. Let's focus on the facts people. And a google search once in a while wouldn't hurt. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with writing papers for a medical journal. It's all about accurate assessment of a specific patients medical state and peer review of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_peer_review

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:
And for all I know, DIRTY_WATER may be an empty set.

Speculating about what may be going on is not philosophy, it's not journalism, it's not theology, and it sure is not science. If you don't want to situate your discourse anywhere, you don't have to, but it's going to be a lonely year for you away from your science fiction fan club.

I wasn't speculating about anything. I was making a specific and accurate statement about a specific state of my ignorance.

No, John. You used the auxiliary 'may', which is full of speculation. If you wanted to talk about facts or the state of your ignorance, you'd say something like, "I don't know what I'm talking about".

John Platko wrote:What exactly is standard medical practice to determine a specific patients medical illness, current state of health, and cause of change? And what peer review process comes into play if there is any doubt about an individual doctors performance in any of those steps. A link to a non biased source of this information should be easy for you to provide. Where is it? do I have to post it yet again?

There isn't one, unless you're doing an epidemiological study of particular causes of one kind of disease. Clinical studies imply controls and systematic study of whether one treatment is effective on one illness.

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

lyingcheat wrote:

John Platko wrote: Given the number of religions and varied methodology used to gather "religious evidence" (RE) it's hard to come up with a concise and complete definition. But I'll give it a go:

Element e belongs to the set ALL_RE, which consists of all RE, if e is deemed to be RE by any person claiming or considered to be religious.

This ^^^ definition is circular. It's a, no doubt typically, meaningless example of itself asserted by someone who fits the definition.

Though I note it would also allow every bizarre delusion ever uttered by any psychotic in the grip of devout religious mania to be considered 'religious evidence', regardless of the apparent theme.


Too too silly.

Absurd, what is circular? All I did is define terms, I haven't used them in an argument yet. I.e. There's no argument to be circular!

You have worse problems than that. You're basically defining a term to be the term that people use when they use that term. That's pretty circular right there; worse yet, you've supplied no further documentation that the set of people who actually use the term as you define it is not an empty set. If you use it yourself, more power to you.

I invite you to examine the ample evidence of what is and is not RE accumulated through the centuries and if you can demonstrate that my definition is flawed I'll be happy to correct my error. Till that time, it stands uncontested.

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

lyingcheat wrote:


This ^^^ definition is circular. It's a, no doubt typically, meaningless example of itself asserted by someone who fits the definition.

Though I note it would also allow every bizarre delusion ever uttered by any psychotic in the grip of devout religious mania to be considered 'religious evidence', regardless of the apparent theme.


Too too silly.

Absurd, what is circular? All I did is define terms, I haven't used them in an argument yet. I.e. There's no argument to be circular!

You have worse problems than that. You're basically defining a term to be the term that people use when they use that term. That's pretty circular right there; worse yet, you've supplied no further documentation that the set of people who actually use the term as you define it is not an empty set. If you use it yourself, more power to you.

I invite you to examine the ample evidence of what is and is not RE accumulated through the centuries and if you can demonstrate that my definition is flawed I'll be happy to correct my error. Till that time, it stands uncontested.

Wrong. You are the one making the claim and thereby carries the burden of proof.
More-over your definition is nothing but an appeal to anecdote and blind assertion.
Religious evidence is whatever a religious person says is religous evidence.

John Platko wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

John Platko wrote:

MrFungus420 wrote:

No, I have never said that.

What they are doing is NOT peer review. Part of the peer-review process is people outside of your group examining and trying to verify or falsify your claims.

But, that does not matter because the doctors are NOT part of declaring it a miracle. The ONLY thing that they do is claim to rule out natural causes. All that they can do is say that it is not explained.



That evidence was weighed by the medical professionals. Their determination is that it is unexplained.



Not religious evidence.

The opinion of a bishop.



The medical findings are irrelevant except to rule something out. There is NO medical evidence that there was a miracle.

From that point, it is nothing more than an argument from ignorance. "This is unexplained, therefore it was a miracle."

The funny thing is that about 5 years ago, Lourdes stopped declaring healings as "miraculous", but now calls them "remarkable"; in part because it is nearly impossible to meet the original criteria (the Lambertini criteria). For example, cancer can virtually never meet the criteria (it can go into spontaneous remission and treatment is so common that virtually nobody with cancer hasn't received some treatment).

Furthermore, there is no way to verify whether or not God caused a miracle to happen

Let's try this again even mmmmmmmooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeee slllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwllllllllllllllyyyyyyy.

What specific medical conclusion is the task of the International Lourdes Medical Committee (abbreviated in French to CMIL)

Hint:

From Wikipedia
CMIL is not entitled to pronounce a cure "miraculous"; this can only be done by the Church. The bureau may only pronounce that a cure is "medically inexplicable".

Can we agree on this much? I'm hoping for a yes or no.

It is irrelevant what the specific task of the CMIL is. The fact remains that it's conclusions aren't based on independently peer-reviewed evidence.
More importantly, since it ultimately comes down to the subjective decision of the bishop, the entire process is meaningless.

You are mistaken.

Blind counterfactual assertion.
If you cannot show how I'm mistaken, don't claim I am. As it is all you offer is blind dismissal.

John Platko wrote:

MrFungus420 wrote:

John Platko wrote:Element e belongs to the set ALL_RE, which consists of all RE, if e is deemed to be RE by any person claiming or considered to be religious.

Okay, let's try another tack.

Element e (evidence) belongs to the set of ALL_BE (all bigfoot evidence), which consists of all BE, if e is deemed to be BE by any person claiming to or considered to believe in bigfoot.

Element e (evidence) belongs to the set of ALL_AE (all astrological evidence), which consists of all AE, if e is deemed to be AE by any person claiming to or considered to believe in astrology.

Element e (evidence) belongs to the set of ALL_AAE (all alien abduction evidence), which consists of all AAE, if e is deemed to be AAE by any person claiming to or considered to have been abducted by aliens.

Great, you've got the hang of it. Now would you like to take a crack of defining Evidence, emperical evidence, and scientific emperical evidence or shall I?

FFS John, these definitions have already been provided and explained to you.
Stop with this pathetic attempt to pretend they haven't. It's lying about the posts of other members which is against the FUA.

John Platko wrote:

MrFungus420 wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

It is always strange that uneducated peasant people are involved.

In Ireland there are so many shrines and holy places. Does John accept that they are all valid as well?

If you read my definition of Religious Evidence (RE) you would know the answer to that.

Yes, it IS Religious Evidence.

ANYTHING that a religious person claims is religious evidence IS religious evidence.

Excellent! Houston we have regained com link.

Either you fail to see that this is completely circular or you're trolling.
Either way it doesn't reflect well on you.

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:
And for all I know, DIRTY_WATER may be an empty set.

Speculating about what may be going on is not philosophy, it's not journalism, it's not theology, and it sure is not science. If you don't want to situate your discourse anywhere, you don't have to, but it's going to be a lonely year for you away from your science fiction fan club.

I wasn't speculating about anything. I was making a specific and accurate statement about a specific state of my ignorance.

No, John. You used the auxiliary 'may', which is full of speculation. If you wanted to talk about facts or the state of your ignorance, you'd say something like, "I don't know what I'm talking about".

There's more than one way to parse my sentence. And don't try to put your words in my mouth, I don't really like the flavor.

John Platko wrote:What exactly is standard medical practice to determine a specific patients medical illness, current state of health, and cause of change? And what peer review process comes into play if there is any doubt about an individual doctors performance in any of those steps. A link to a non biased source of this information should be easy for you to provide. Where is it? do I have to post it yet again?

There isn't one, unless you're doing an epidemiological study of particular causes of one kind of disease. Clinical studies imply controls and systematic study of whether one treatment is effective on one illness.

It's impossible to do a double blind study with controls when you only have 1 patient.

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:
Reviewing only cases from Lourdes could never constitute a clinical trial for medical science.

I didn't say anything about a clinical trial. What the doctors do for the specific cases at Lourdes is a clinical case review- and that's different than a clinical trial.

All this means is that if you are trying to represent the participation of physicians at Lourdes as a scientific investigation, you've been offered arguments as to why that would be a misrepresentation.

If you want to piggyback your woo-belief on what you think are scientific principles, knock yourself out. I don't think anyone here seriously expects you to understand the folly of that. Your particular brand of woo throws a fog over every point you've tried to make by devoting to it an attention span of microseconds. The whole point is not to confront the dishonest fogging that you are engaged in post by tedious post.

You clearly have the opinion that your brand of woo ought not to be mocked for what it is. Cry me a river, John.

Facts. Let's focus on the facts people. And a google search once in a while wouldn't hurt. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with writing papers for a medical journal.

Except that it has.
You're talking about a miracle cure. Which requires scientific and peer-reviewed research.
Otherwise it's nothing but an assertion.

John Platko wrote:It's all about accurate assessment of a specific patients medical state and peer review of that.

Correction, the absence of an explanation for a cure.
Which can only be established if and when all possible solutions have been examined. Which is impossible for one doctor to do.

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

Speculating about what may be going on is not philosophy, it's not journalism, it's not theology, and it sure is not science. If you don't want to situate your discourse anywhere, you don't have to, but it's going to be a lonely year for you away from your science fiction fan club.

I wasn't speculating about anything. I was making a specific and accurate statement about a specific state of my ignorance.

No, John. You used the auxiliary 'may', which is full of speculation. If you wanted to talk about facts or the state of your ignorance, you'd say something like, "I don't know what I'm talking about".

There's more than one way to parse my sentence. And don't try to put your words in my mouth, I don't really like the flavor.

John Platko wrote:What exactly is standard medical practice to determine a specific patients medical illness, current state of health, and cause of change? And what peer review process comes into play if there is any doubt about an individual doctors performance in any of those steps. A link to a non biased source of this information should be easy for you to provide. Where is it? do I have to post it yet again?

There isn't one, unless you're doing an epidemiological study of particular causes of one kind of disease. Clinical studies imply controls and systematic study of whether one treatment is effective on one illness.

It's impossible to do a double blind study with controls when you only have 1 patient.

Where did he mention double blind studies?
And it is possible, as long as the patient suffers from a disease that has affected other people as well.

I think the devout missed this story that was doing the rounds a couple of weeks ago:

The report finds that common bacteria that cause illness are often found in holy water, as are nitrates (chemicals used in fertilizers and commonly found in runoff from farms). ABC News says that “if ingested, water containing nitrates over the maximum contaminant level could cause serious illness, especially in infants younger than six months, which could lead to death if untreated, according to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.”

http://catholicexchange.com/this-just-in-holy-water-can-kill

Far from healing, and curing the incurable, holy water could actually be killing people.

John Platko wrote:Facts. Let's focus on the facts people. And a google search once in a while wouldn't hurt. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with writing papers for a medical journal. It's all about accurate assessment of a specific patients medical state and peer review of that.

No, John, let's cut to the chase, already. You are offering a simple speculation, which is that god or some supernatural force sometimes (and very infrequently) intervenes in the material affairs of ordinary reality. In this case it is a speculation about medical miracles (events that can NEVER be explained in any other way than by divine intervention in our reality). You have obfuscated this simple speculation to the Nth degree, presumably to make it appear as if some intellectual effort were involved. The upshot of that, of course is to imply that something complicated is going on, and rational skeptical people (if they are sincere) should take an interest in the possibility that divine or supernatural interventions in ordinary events can and do take place.

FWIW, John, the bottom line for me is that there is no one to one mapping between events unexplained by science (always reported anecdotally) and the intervention of a deity, except for people who already believe in god. Furthermore, some people even seem to believe that the fact that the universe is at all scientifically comprehensible is 'evidence' of deity. Demonstrating that events at Lourdes are other than chance or spontaneous ones is beyond your capabilities, and that is why you have obfuscated the matter so badly, to the point of arguing about the perfectly plausible opinions of people who can't explain everything that happens even when people are NOT cured.

You've got one issue, and that is to try to legitimate your 'religious evidence' to people who don't accept it. In addition, your persistence is only evidence of your own strong beliefs about... something. You don't seem to know whether you want to tell people about god or about your self-evaluated intellectual prowess. Spontaneous cures without medical interventions occur far away from Catholic shrines. You're certainly immune to admitting that your argument is going nowhere.

John Platko wrote:I invite you to examine the ample evidence of what is and is not RE accumulated through the centuries and if you can demonstrate that my definition is flawed I'll be happy to correct my error. Till that time, it stands uncontested.

Christ on a stick with peanuts and chocolate coating, John. You've tried to define RE as whatever anyone who wants to call something RE calls RE. What is not RE is, then, quite logically, what NO ONE will call RE. There simply is no way for RE to be all of one kind, since any person can declare it to be whatever he considers RE. Furthermore, you have offered no way of detecting RE that is only plagiarized from someone else's plagiarized RE. Your 'definition' is intellectual garbage, and if you don't realise that yet, it's little wonder that you also don't realise you've wasted 500 posts here spewing the utterest intellectual garbage. You're not a skeptic, John, and so the set of what is not RE is much smaller for you than it is for skeptics. How is that possible? Do you have the Special Sauce, and skeptics don't? Bend a fucking spoon already.

A personal testimonial of religious experience is the same as religious evidence. All I have is evidence that people tell stories about their deities. No spoons were bent in the making of this film.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Absurd, what is circular? All I did is define terms, I haven't used them in an argument yet. I.e. There's no argument to be circular!

You have worse problems than that. You're basically defining a term to be the term that people use when they use that term. That's pretty circular right there; worse yet, you've supplied no further documentation that the set of people who actually use the term as you define it is not an empty set. If you use it yourself, more power to you.

I invite you to examine the ample evidence of what is and is not RE accumulated through the centuries and if you can demonstrate that my definition is flawed I'll be happy to correct my error. Till that time, it stands uncontested.

Wrong. You are the one making the claim and thereby carries the burden of proof.
More-over your definition is nothing but an appeal to anecdote and blind assertion.
Religious evidence is whatever a religious person says is religous evidence.

I''ve examined the evidence, written evidence even, describing HOW religious accumulate religious evidence and described that mathematically. Now to show that I'm wrong, what you need to do is to provide at least one example of religious evidence that demonstrates an error in my math. So where's your evidence? I don't think you'll come up with any- just like you failed to provide definitions for: evidence, empirical evidence, peer review, etc. but stay tuned, I'll define those mathematically too, same bat station, same bat way ....

John Platko wrote:I''ve examined the evidence, written evidence even, describing HOW religious accumulate religious evidence and described that mathematically. Now to show that I'm wrong, what you need to do is to provide at least one example of religious evidence that demonstrates an error in my math. So where's your evidence? I don't think you'll come up with any- just like you failed to provide definitions for: evidence, empirical evidence, peer review, etc. but stay tuned, I'll define those mathematically too, same bat station, same bat way ....

Who the fuck would be fool enough to try to show you you're 'wrong'? You conflate a lack of falsifiability with truth. Convincing you that you're wrong might be useful in getting you to shut the fuck up and go home, but you simply have no standards by which you could admit being wrong. For you, religious evidence is whatever anyone says is religious evidence. You have not even managed to show that anyone else in the known universe has a concept of 'religious evidence', let alone this particular one, and you're using it to try to speak for people who are not involved in this conversation, and who may not exist at all.

John Platko wrote:
It's impossible to do a double blind study with controls when you only have 1 patient.

What an oafish mistake about what is and is not scientific, John. One of a kind events cannot be studied scientifically. If there is only one locality where a fossil is found, you have to be able to tell people where to find it. If you take the only sample, you're going to have trouble publishing. That's what the Piltdown Man was about. Another name for that is 'fraud'.