Lol. Such ignorance. Three claims you've made so far:

1 - Jesus is a false prophet
2 - Mohammad is Allah's son
3 - You are Allah's brother

You're lucky that Islam is a joke, otherwise you'd be headed straight to hell with this talk

You know that "phrasing it differently" and "saying something completely different" are not the same thing, right? This is utterly ridiculous.

You confuse "prophet" with "son of God," and yet you think you can read and understand things better than the rest of us? Welcome to the age of the Internet, when people can learn things without pants on.

It's not the idea of making of religion that bothers (offends) people, it's the idea of attacking people's personal beliefs. Try attacking someone's political beliefs through belittlement, humiliation, ad hominems etc. and see how well it goes. Odds are it would go worse in typical discourse than attacking religious beliefs.

I am not in favor of attacking religious views for the sake of attacking them. But who knows how different people actions which are not supposed to be humiliating, belittling, etc. Some people get offended if you don't believe in creationism, ffs. "You called me a monkey!"

I would "attack" people's political, as well as religious views if I have reasons to do so. They are free to attack mine. What's the problem?

This is where people make false assumptions and inferences, and jump the gun. It happens a lot with politarding, commonly known as strawmaning. But you knew that.

The people who react with vitriol when you deny creationism and exclaim that you're calling them a monkey like you've mentioned is just an example of this.

Can I get a flashlight? That's a pretty deep hole!

Actually, I think most of us are able to take these things in stride when they concern politics. I get slightly irritated when some conservative calls me a leftist or a socialist (not knowing what those terms actually mean), but on the other hand, I can also laugh at conservative humor and mocking too when it hits the target. And I know many conservatives who can laugh at the excesses on their side as well.

My speculation is actually that religious beliefs are extremely sensitive because they concern things that (1) people desperately want (such as being able to escape death as the permanent cessation of existence) and (2) they actually know, deep in their heart, are not that likely to be true. That's a lethal combination where mockery or even criticism is concerned, because mockery and criticism remind the believer of the truths they don't want to face.

In contrast, where you are really sure of something or don't have a lot invested in it, criticism or mockery isn't going to bother you much at all.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head here, because is that this especially applies to Muslims, as I argued in my response to Hardball in the "obviously man-made religions" thread.

See, the big - and terribly obvious - problem is that only you know what's in your own heart. Nobody else. It's unreasonable to say 2.

Couldn't you say the exactly the same thing about atheists?

As far as some theists be touchy, they are no more touchy then some atheists. Look at any of the threads where I make a atheists-are-going-to-flame type post.

No, this is very wrong. You are declaring the whole field of psychology pointless by making this statement.

Not really. I don't think atheists are that offended about being mocked. Nor do most atheists desperately want there to be no God.

What you are confusing is that some (not all) atheists are offended by the celebration of what they see as complete BS in the form of the privileged position religious belief has in our society. Or they get pissed about viokations of the separation of church and state.

But mockery? Criticisms of atheism or nonbelief? I haven't met many nonbelievers who react to this.

Psychology is in the business of studying and predicting behavior, not telepathy and mind reading.

No, you're wrong again. This was the goal of behaviorism which died 60 years ago. Psychology is very much in the business of mind reading.

I think you're starting to lose it, dude. Reading brain signals and stimuli responses under controlled fMRI experiments and such isn't mind reading. What some of the X-Men do is mind reading.

Obviously, I wasn't using the expression to mean literal mind-reading. I was talking about psychology being able to tell things about people's beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and so on (most of the time even more accurately than the people whose beliefs etc. are being measured can tell!), since you said "...only you know what's in your own heart. Nobody else." That's clearly ridiculous.

Yeah, okay, let's hook people up to a machine that tells us what they're thinking.

Oh wait, this isn't the movies.

Lol. If you have no idea what you're talking about, why even bother? Just admit (in your mind, if you are uncomfortable acknowledging ignorance in public) you were wrong and move on.

What are you even talking about then? You're claiming that we have the technology to hook people's brains up to a machine that tells us what they're thinking about in real-time, kind of like the voice text app that types words in real-time as you speak into your phone.

Can you quote me claiming this?

So yeah, how is it then that we're able to tell people's beliefs, attitudes (base emotions, like fear and joy can already be read with brain scans, so I'm with you on that one) "and so on"? Magic? Or technology?

Methodology?

When you said that psychology is only concerned with studying and predicting behavior, that implied that it treated the cognitive system generating that behavior as a black box. But after the cognitive revolution of the 50s, this hasn't been the case. Psychologists, cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and so on want to know what sort of mechanisms yield the observed behavior. You can talk about those mechanisms on different levels: neural networks, symbol systems, schemas, frames, attitudes, beliefs, etc. The main point is that you can infer things about people's minds from their behavior or by using neuro-imaging techniques, eye trackers, physiology monitoring devices, etc.

I'll give you one example. There is this methodology called Implicit Association Test (IAT) that was developed about 10 years ago. One of the things it's used for quite frequently is measuring people's attitudes toward different things (e.g., minorities). It's implicit in that you never explicitly ask participants questions like "how do you feel about Muslims" or "do you dislike homosexuals". It's kinda long to explain the test in detail now, but in short, using the response time data to different stimuli, researchers are able to get access to private attitudes that many times the people holding them don't even know about. That is, it may turn out that you have hidden prejudice toward certain groups of people, even though you are convinced that you actually don't.

Uncovering hidden possible hidden prejudices =/= mind reading. Wtf, man. Don't call it that in the first place.

I already clarified a few posts ago that by "mind reading" I didn't mean literal "x-men" type mind reading. In fact, you were the one who first used that expression itt.

I was mainly responding to your claim that only you can tell what's "in your heart". Hopefully, I have managed to make a point that this is false.

I'm sorry, I can't believe no one noticed this, but how does that work? Isn't it like saying "my Amish sex therapist?" Although, honestly, I did have a philosophy course from a Mormon, and that was about what you'd expect.