That was beautiful! Thank you for sharing that!

No I never had a valid point and that's why they're up in arms and obsessing over my punctuation. Check/LOL.

When I deride the religion and the belief system, that (in part), as someone said, is motivated from my shadow.

When apologists use all manners of diversionary tactics, that is coming from their shadow.

(*The previous sentences need to be hyper-checked for grammatical perfection, you know, like all internet forum posts do. I recommend inspection of the slash (a la "Dolly's" Super/System and potential comma irregularities ... and then three or four days debate over it. Also whether or not to include a space pre and post ellipsis is important here. You know, because these are debates you at least might win.)

Finally.

(Welcome to the Internets...)

Nah. I mean, he even linked an article where the first sentence starts like this:

And he still somehow doesn't want to concede that he didn't quote Einstein. And he also still thinks that this is having something to do with grammar, despite the fact that a lot of us have been pretty explicit about what we're questioning him on.

To quote George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh6qqsmxNs

Note: Some cursing in the video, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Wow, you're making even less sense than normal.

What is your point (if any)?

I noticed that earlier and thought he possibly looked that up because he was struggling so much.

In any case, this doesn’t really matter that much.

Here is another really good song:

What is Trump doing opening churches? That's not safe yet and it's something that can easily be done online.

High COVID-19 Attack Rate Among Attendees at Events at a Church — Arkansas, March 2020

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6920e2.htm

This isn't the politics forum.

If someone needs to go to church, go. I'll be wearing a mask when I meet you at Wal-Mart.

Meh -- We've talked a lot in the intersection of politics and religion.

Not Trump and churches. Unless I've missed something since early April.

Not sure how the shutting down of churches isn't a relevant topic in this Forum.

The mod can move the topic if s/he wants.

I think the post was about Trump, and opening churches.

But hey, go for it.

Not specifically Trump and churches, but definitely Trump:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...trump-1639438/

And definitely Republicanism:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...icans-1749715/

Was RGT better when it was more active? It was more fun, yes, but was it better?


Hell yes it was better: it was more fun!


I doubt we'll see another Splendour ('member Splendour? I 'member).
But it's possible that another copy-pasting forum jumper (especially one who "likes to talk with atheists philosophically") turns up some day:

You see I have this idea that man can get to the existence of God from the concept of God, which concept has already been formulated by the thinkers of mankind from since millennia way back.

This is a pretty egregious error for a mathematician to make!

(And yes, I know that over a large enough normally distributed sample the median and the mean converge. Still!)

I doubt it was ever really strong. It was probably, as it is today, a small intellectual movement with minimal influence in the mainstream. It probably felt stronger because you identified with it.

There was also elements of personality cults in the movement. Certain spearhead figures were the standard-bearers, and a lot of debate was centered on defending them or advancing them. I was critical of that then and I am critical of it now. An intellectual movement has to stand on its merits, not popular faces. People fail, merits endure.

If you go to the right places you will find it today. Independent forums are a dying breed and social media platforms have taken over. I would say this has taken its toll on quality, as any discussion platform that uses "likes" reward popularity too much in arguments. That also has the side-effect of breeding a type of argument that could never effectively be used against theism or religious beliefs, since these are simply put a lot more popular.

I think atheism will naturally progress simply because of access to information. Theism and religion is at its weakest intellectually when you shine a light on it. This is not a linear plot, because the way digital information is distributed today, it creates funneling effects and the information stream can manipulated for short periods of time.

One of the mistakes of atheist communities is the idea that this is a battle over "information." If you observe the way that the majority of human process and respond to information, you'll see that there's a lot of reason to doubt that more information is what actually changes things.

This is really more about social acceptability.

Aaron,

What did Harris say in particular that you think makes him an Islamophobe?
I've seen the video clip where Ben Affleck gets his panties all in a wad. I thought Harris was spot on.

Theoretically speaking, can one make statements about Islam in general w/out being labelled an Islamophobe? (in your opinion)

The link provides a pretty good summary. It's a collective body of statements, and not any one specific statement.

Yes. The place where you fall into that category comes from basically false generalizations, often borne out of bad theological readings of Muslim theology (which is not monolithic). You can also have problems with making poor historical analyses that blindly boil everything down to religious motivation. In virtually any context, such myopic analyses of complex socio-historical movements are fraught with error.

Religious perspectives are not above criticism. But the criticism must be fair and honest to both the facts of reality and the specifics of the theology as it's broadly understood by its adherents.

Fair enough... I'll check it out.

I think Greenwald's case here on the merits is poor and an example of the impulse common on the left right now to avoid engaging ideas on their merits and instead focus on how awful the person putting forward those ideas is for putting them forward. Intellectual cowards, mostly.

This understanding of "Islamophobia" would seem to make many Islamic fundamentalists Islamophobic (and fundamentalist Christians Christianophobic, etc) given that their views on Islam are full of false generalizations, bad readings of theology, and attributing too much agency to religious motivation. I agree with Greenwald that Islamophobia implies an animus against Islam, not just false statements and bad analysis.

I would agree with this addition.

When I think about it in context of Harris, I think primarily of his emphasis on what he viewed were the uniquely harmful aspects of Islam (to the point of advocating for torture and racial profiling), with many of those arguments being based on making false assertions and bad generalizations. The animus is implicit in those claims, but it's proper to note that explicitly.

That's a bad inference imo. Presumably Harris made those claims (although I highly doubt your description of his view of torture is accurate) because he thought they were true. Why would his thinking they were true show animus against Muslims? Do you have some special reason to not apply the principle of charity to Sam Harris?

We can reasonably assert that people in the KKK believed it was true that blacks were inferior to whites. Does their belief in the truth of the assertion imply an absence of animus? I don't think so.

As far as Harris' view of torture, he has an entire article titled "In Defense of Torture": https://samharris.org/in-defense-of-torture/. (The underlying argument is kind of an all-or-nothing argument about war, and I don't think it's particularly persuasive.)

Whether you think my description of his view as "advocating for torture" is accurate is left as an interpretation that you are welcome to disagree with.

This is why I referred festeringZit to the collective body of statements and not any particular statement. Animus towards a person or a group is sometimes overt enough that a singular statement or action is sufficient as evidence. But this is not always the case. Sometimes, it's the collective body of works that leads one to reach that conclusion.

And that's my view of Sam Harris' views of Islam. At some point, being charitable is to choose to be willfully ignorance of the available evidence.