Such a smart guy, yet he thinks the Earth is 6000 years old and Noah was 600 when he built the ark. Sounds super logical to me...

Edit: My post was geared more towards the people that voted for him anyway.

The bolded is a false inference. When you vote for person X, it does not imply that you support absolutely everything person X says. In fact, this is precisely the stupid gotcha politics game that people who tend to be infantile in their politics play that I'm not at all surprised to find that you're playing.

There are logical reasons to support person X even if you disagree with a particular statement or belief that person X puts forward. I suspect that the majority of people would see that statement and think that it's a fairly unreasonable point of view.

I think the logic put forward is terrible for lots of reasons.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, 40% of Americans self-identify as YECs: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/be...n-origins.aspx. The inference is hardly unjustified.

Nothing to see here though, right, Aaron? I'm sure they probably just voted for GG based on his progressive views on freedom of the press.

You asked me about a specific quote that had nothing to do with YEC and then threw that in as an extra. And now you're taking my comment to be referring to YEC. Great job with the intellectual honesty, there. You're totally not guilty of a bait-and-switch.

At some point in the next 1000 posts or so, I hope you'll finally do something about your repeated failures. You're really embarrassing yourself at this point with this nonsense, and I'm going to start coming down on you harder for it.

There's plenty to see here. But you're looking in the wrong direction.

YEC as a dominant theological position is primarily a US-based phenomenon. If you would like to learn more (that's a joke, because we all know you don't have any interest in learning), there's a book that you can read called "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" that traces this particular string of American Christian Anti-Intellectualism (among other things).

The blatant error you're making is that you're oversimplifying voting patterns to draw conclusions that you want to believe. You've now done it twice:

1) People voted for this guy, and this guy said X. Therefore, people believe X.

2) People voted for this guy, and they both believe X. Therefore, people voted for him because of X.

No wonder you got yourself banned from politics. This is below even their standards when it comes to political analysis. Fortunately for you, you won't get banned for being stupid here. And fortunately for us, this gives us an opportunity to keep the conversation going so that you can continue your asinine attempts at holding on to your false beliefs because it helps you feel better about yourself and I can continue decimating them because I'm entertained by that.

In general, it seems like someone's about to go on monkey tilt. Take a break, bro. It's time to stop posting.

My point is that you're literally playing in the world of abject stupidity by having no intellectual foundation.

What you're doing here is shifting around what you're talking about. And this isn't the first time you've done that. You start off talking about X, but when that falls apart you try to generalize so that you portray yourself as talking about some more general thing Y, and X is only an example of it. By doing that, you can avoid the fact that you're wrong about X and can change the subject to talk about Y instead. I can't recall how many times you've done this at this point.

So feel free to keep proving to me that you're playing the role of an absolute twit in this conversation.

If you are looking for me to reject literal readings of the Bible, I can do that for you right now. I reject a literal reading of the Bible.

LOL -- I know why nothing is getting done. Your brain is broken. After 600+ posts, you still have not proven yourself to be capable of even modest feats of intelligence.

Ummmm... I thought this was all about a religiously-based phenomenon. You know. This is something about how religious people think and not something about how Americans think? Oh wait... that assumes you're capable of intellectual consistency.

So... sure.

Uhhhhhh.... yeah... okay... So.............. yeah. I'm just going to let that one stand as a symbol of your maximal level of intellectual effort and ability.

Oh. That's right. It's so much better for you to be banned for being stupid and not following instructions than just being stupid. That gives you two things to hang your head about instead of just one.

You got banned because you did stupid things like not being able to stay on topic. Kind of like what you're doing here. Except you won't get banned for it in RGT. You'll merely be humiliated. (But you probably won't even recognize the humiliation anyway, so you'll think you're doing a great job.)

You were just being fervent, just like those religious nut jobs. I'm sure you've got nothing in common with them.

Your abject failure to read any more into anything I've said than the words you literally see on the screen in front of you is a testament to the fact that, at least one religious person is a humourless individual [OrP: "individual" is OK, right?] incapable of parsing nuance and completely devoid of wit.

I hope for your sake there is a god, because nether I nor history are going to forgive you for lending your intelligence to such a lost and regressive cause.

"Why won't you read the words I didn't write? Where's your nuance?"

Better to be devoid of wit than devoid of rational intelligence. But even better to actually have both, rather than having neither.

LOL... This is just sad.

TTHRIC

Sure, but my guess is that has more to do with the demographics of the kind of atheists that post on poker forums than with the views of atheists more generally. I also assume that about 80% of the condemnation you see here on 2p2 wouldn't be made in an IRL personal interaction.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here. What I would say here is that I view moral theories as affecting people's behaviors only at the margins, so I wouldn't expect an intellectual commitment to typically have a dramatic effect on people's actions. Religion, which affects a broader swathe of human life, typically has a greater effect imo.

I think this is an overly narrow view of consequentialism. Intentions are relevant to consequentialism. For instance, when evaluating whether someone's actions are blameworthy, we should be evaluating the consequences of their actions on the basis of expected utility rather than actual outcomes, and expected utility will probably depend in part on motivations.

I agree that motivations grounded in truth generally fare better. The problem is what to do when that we are faced with multiple forced options without truth distinguishing between them. The mistake I see many religious people make is a kind of bait-and-switch. Many of them will say that if the god they believe in exists, then their belief in that god is based on truth-seeking motivations (and vice versa for the lack of belief). Then, since they in fact believe in that god, they infer that their belief in that god is based on truth-seeking motivations. I don't think this kind of boot-strapping rationality works. Religious beliefs like this are too specific.

When building a model, the assumptions you start with will influence the outputs, agreed. However, think about common contexts in which models are attacked. If you think someone is being irrational for accepting some model, you do so by attempting to show that they are not acting in good faith (eg that their study showing smoking is safe is not rational because it is not an attempt to find the truth). On the other hand, if we disagree with someone, but think they genuinely accept their results, are not unduly biased by non-truth seeking motives, and adequately understood the tools to find the truth in that domain, we are much less likely to claim that they are being unreasonable or irrational even if we think they are wrong. So I still think that for determining whether a belief is rational, that the goals for holding the belief are more important than the specific axioms with which a worldview begins.

This is the point of distinguishing between a lie and BS. A lie is still within a model of rationality where discourse is truth-directed, and so can be criticized on those grounds. But criticizing a BSer for saying something false will not really affect them - their reasons for saying the false statement don't have to do with whether or not it is true.

Perhaps, but perhaps not. How dramatic of an effect are you talking about?

This is also where you get into extremely gray territory given that you've identified "Christians" (at least in the past) as people who identify themselves as Christian. You now are in a place where people are also self-identifying what things are "religious to them" and almost as a corollary an atheist would have a smaller range of things that are influenced by that. But this doesn't imply that the same mechanisms aren't in place in the decision-making process. They're just not labeled as "religious" influences any more.

Here's an example that comes to mind. As a Christian, I would choose not to get romantically involved with someone who is not Christian. I think the core of values that I hold (also in the context of my family, activities I choose to participate in, how I spend my money, etc.) would be less congruous because we would not have quite the same shared life goals (or whatever). This would be an "religious" decision for me.

But an atheist who has decided not to get romantically involved with a religious person (for whatever reasons they cite) are using basically the same mechanism. It just has a different label.

And going back to the consequentialist perspective, do you not actually make decisions by thinking about the outcomes of your behaviors? How far do you take that, or how far do you not take that? Do you make decisions that ignore this principle that you've adopted for determining the best decisions to make? (After all, you must make decisions all the time.)

But this just turns things into a black box, doesn't it? Do you have access to motivations of people outside of yourself? In the manipulation example, you also run into situations where you have people who perceive their intentions as good and pure, but from the outside it looks entirely different.

I will agree that many are like this, especially those that were brought up with a deep religious commitment to things such as apologetics. At least as a Christian criticizing another, I often would be in position of pushing back against some of the statements put forward by people with that type of background. There's definitely far too much "obviously"-type statements that flow out. And this isn't that different from the many atheists that put forward statements such as those found in this thread.

However, I would also say that boot-strapping rationality seems to be a much more reflective of how human psychology seems to be wired. It seems that we all build our rationality through experience and not in the abstract. What tends to vary how explicitly we acknowledge the influence of our experiences on what we perceive.

But to clarify a point: You said "Religious beliefs like this are too specific." Which beliefs are you considering in this statement?

This is an interesting point. I'm not as sure that the framing of this in terms of "goals" feels quite right to me, but I have some sense of what you're saying. I think this falls into the gap between the things that we explicitly acknowledge and the things we are doing implicitly (or perhaps, emotionally).

I'm not sure I agree with this. It's true that there are pathological liars out there who are pretty much immune to criticism. But there are people who say things more out of an emotional reaction, and criticisms of those people (at the right time) can turn the conversation back towards being a truth-directed discourse, and can have an effect.

But you're right in the sense that "in the heat of the moment" there are times when bringing a truth-directed conversation to the table is a waste of time. But in these situations, it's a waste of time even for people who aren't BSers. Sometimes, people are "locked" in a particular emotional outlook with a particular emotional goal.

And perhaps, there could be something here about your concept of a "lie." In my mind, lying is making a knowingly false statement, not just a false statement. If the conversation is truth-directed and someone makes a false statement, presumably it's an unknowingly false statement (since it's a truth-directed conversation), and so it's not a lie. It's just an error.

I call.

I LOL.

Jesus, man, you do continuously make this effort to put yourself as a humourless bible-thumper. Is this by design, or does it just come naturally?

Awwww... Someone got pissy again. How cute.

Congratulations on your first clever statement!

First, I wasn't comparing atheism and religion, but religion and moral theories. For instance, if someone converted to Mormonism I would expect much bigger changes in their life than if they adopted Aristotelian virtue ethics. This is mostly because religion affects people's live in all sorts of non-moral ways, eg going to church and joining a spiritual community, prayer, reading scriptures, identity sorting, etc.

That being said, I would probably still expect more impact from religion over atheism just because atheism is a relatively thin identity relative to most religions.

These are broad questions - can you narrow it down a bit? If it helps, I adopt a rule-consequentialism, satisficing version of consequentialism. As to how far, my view is that you start where you are, and peel of bits of actions and ways of thinking about the world and try to improve them by forming better habits and behavior algorithms. Yes, I would say that vast majority of my decisions are made without thought to moral considerations at all. I view morality as more about forming character than beliefs, and good character in part means doing the right thing without having to go through a process of moral reasoning.

The primary object of my moral critique is myself, where I do have some phenomenological access to my motivations. That being said, I don't think other people's motivations are just a black box. Most humans have some theory of mind about what is going on in other people's heads - I'm one of them.

Attempts to justify religious belief on the basis of basic beliefs, or a sensus divinitatis, etc are not able to give any justification for favoring any specific belief system, they are just a way to say that it is possible that this specific belief system is rational or warranted given the evidence we actually have. This can be useful in combating some strong versions of atheism, but it doesn't give you much beyond that.

I think most of these people responding in the heat of the moment are still abiding by a norm of truth. People's judgement about what is true or false often deterioriates when they are passionate about an issue, but I don't think this is a sign that they are not abiding by a norm of truth.
A lie is not just knowingly making a false statement. For instance, actors often knowing make false statements, but they are not lying. This is because there is no presumption that they are saying the truth during a performance. Lies are specific to truth-oriented discourse - they are the name for when someone knowing breaks the norm of the discourse by asserting something false (Obviously someone can break the norms of a truth-directed conversation, this is not just an error.).

You caught one. Call the mayor!

I feel similarly of you. But if you think I'm wrong that it was your first, and you wanted to highlight your cleverness and show that it's totally non-derivative, go for it.

Topical- I watched "The Usual Suspects" again last night. Great film, bigly yuge.

The greatest trick.... never mind.

Thanks for clarifying this point. I was reading into it a little more than what you were putting forward.

I would agree with you on this point, especially when contextualized with other statements you put forth later.

If you view most of your decisions as being amoral and you've "only" committed yourself to a moral theory, then you're right that there would be little change to your life. Given that framework, then at a certain level I would consider something like the adoption of a moral theory to be mostly devoid of meaning. That is, you've now given intellectual assent to something that basically doesn't matter in any practical way. And I suppose that's fine in the sense that we give mental assent to all sorts of claims all the time.

The aspiration of the first sentence quoted above is similar to the aspiration of many religious people. The Christian cliche way of saying it (which I suspect you've seen before in your experiences) is that "God loves you as you are, but He loves you too much to leave you that way."

Where I think the distinctions would start to arise in our views are both in the method and the desired breadth of impact. I put the "only" in quotes above because you can essentially change moral theories at will without actually having any real impact on how you live. In that sense, I would say that it looks like a "shallow" belief. One of the desired outcomes of religions in general to have a "deep" impact on people's lives, that there's something more than just superficial things going on that are worthy of time and attention.

And at least from the orthodox Christian perspective, there's the idea that the method of change is something that happens at a level that we do not have direct access to. That is, there are aspects of life that you recognize are broken (in some way) and you want to fix them, but are literally unable to accomplish it through your own efforts. (Whether you agree with this claim or not is irrelevant here.)

Sure. And this is the "narrative" type conversation that I had indicated at some point earlier in the thread. The adoption of a particular narrative has a stronger impact on changing one's life (through both internal thought processes and behaviors) than abstract beliefs. And just as with observing human behaviors and trying to discern motivations, narratives that are grounded in truth fare better than those that are not.

The "justification" step of religious belief actually falls along similar lines to how scientific thought progresses. Success or failure of a scientific theory is more than just its ability to describe any particular situation, but also that it fits into (or sometimes creates) a larger narrative to describe more general situations.

I would argue that one of the successes of Christianity is that it's successful at putting together a successful narrative of the whatever it is that this human experience is. And I would say that its success hints at some underlying truths about us in the same way that the success of scientific theories hint at some underlying truths about the physical universe. (Again, you may disagree.)

What those "truths" happen to be, or whether there's even a "truth" there at all... well... neither science nor religion can verify it in a way that's absolutely undeniable. The available basically never lends itself to an absolute singular narrative.

I would disagree with this. Perhaps I have a more cynical view of people or perhaps a more sharp view of truth. I think that when people are arguing from a more "emotionally passionate" place, it's often no longer about truth. It's about persuasion. That is, beyond a certain point, the goal is not driven by a sense of what is true, but rather by a sense of getting the other to agree. You might assert that there's a norm of truth in there somewhere, but it would take some convincing for me to agree with that.

I would disagree with this as well. In what may seem like a contradictory claim, I would say that actors are making true statements, where truth is contextualized in the false universe that's created by the narrative. That is, it's possible for an actor to lie in the context of a performance. For example, "She's not home!" when the actor knows that she's "upstairs" (where "upstairs" refers to a place in the house that is supposed to exist even though it's the same physical location just with different props).

Edit: This is almost like saying that there's "truth" and then there's "Truth."

LOL -- Two in a row! That's what some call a streak!

Your last sentence is something I feel very strongly. When I look at the world, human history and the human condition in general it's rather depressing to think about. I try to be a good person, be kind to others etc etc yet I frequently have strong feelings of helplessness wrt humanity in general. All the poverty, misery and suffering that continues to this day. As an individual you can only do so much. For me religion cannot be the answer though.

It "cannot" be the answer because... ?

There is simple solution to every problem, which is neat, plausible, and wrong.

The guy is genuinely upset about the state of humanity, and I certainly empathise with him. Trust you to use this opportunity to push your agenda, though.

There's a difference between "is not the answer" and "cannot be the answer." But there's this thing called nuance that you've never shown any capacity with. I mean, you've used the word, but it's not clear that it means what you think it means. After all, you've also struggled with reading the dictionary and understanding words in context. So it's quite possible you have no idea what I'm talking about.

As do I.

Right. Because I've clearly been taking every opportunity in this thread to push an agenda. And you've never once done so.