Funny!

Certainly has that authentic feel of the charitable, benevolent old testament sky daddy about it.

Lagtight, have you ever heard of the Streisand effect? You know you will be hearing about sky daddy for years to come now, right?

Such as....?


Such as....?

Quite so!

Please give an example of a "borrowed" wise saying in the Bible.

(I'm open the the possibility that some are in fact, borrowed. A specific example would help, unless you're just speculating, which is cool if that's what you wanna do.)

You seem like you've more or less my age.
I'll be 57 in August.
Before the internet one of the great pass times we had was torturing each other by making fun.

And if you cried to an adult they'd join in.

It probably scarred us but it does thicken your skin a bit. lol

God made Jesus white.

Who am I to judge ?

Even so, burning the bible and all the churches sounds like a mighty fine plan. Throw in the mosques and the synagogues and all their ****ing books too. Organised religion is a cancer on the human race.

Sky Daddy is kind of cool though.

It has some street cred.

It annoys the ever-loving **** out of lagtight because apparently daddy's not in the sky. Which is why I do it, obviously.

Physically I'm 62, my maturity level is about 14, and health-wise I'm about 72.

Meh. The Bible is actually very interesting to read because it gives an idea of how society structured itself thousands of years ago. It was so effective that we still have Jews practicing various systems based on it and even have a sect that branched off and became a world wide religion. There's something very basic that it's message appeals to inside the human mind.

If we outlawed all religions and burned all the books it would just spring up again in some other form. Worship of science is fashionable now. It seems more logical to us but I'm sure it has the same pitfalls.


It's like voting Trump out of office. It's a good thing but won't change much. You have to put a good system in place.

I hear ya.
lol

Obviously I'm being hyperbolic, I'm not for banning anything. I do think that organised religion should not be encouraged or ennobled or given special protections though.

I don't agree re: "worshiping science". "Worshiping" implies some sort of exalted status. Science is merely the method whereby we arrive at conclusions about the world around us using logic. There is nothing to worship. Science is also always evolving and self-correcting, in stark juxtaposition to religion, which is based on inviolable tenets deemed to be carved in stone.

So are you a Copenhagen guy d2_e4?

If I had to choose which one ultimately ended up being correct, I kinda like many-worlds, although it's not a very popular one with scientists because it's essentially unfalsifiable as I understand it. I remember even when I was a little kid I had ideas about parallel universes and worlds splitting at decision points and ****. Ultimately though, I think that while interpretations are fascinating from a philosophical standpoint, it is a mistake to confuse the interpretations (especially as they are popularised for a lay audience) with the science and the maths behind them.

QM is the science of how things which we will never be able to see or experience with any of our other senses behave. The interpretations are there to help us come to grips with some very counter-intuitive behaviours and phenomena in this unfamiliar realm, but the equations are ultimately what drives the science and the engineering which exploits that science.

But some people do worship science. ie they base their life and any decisions around scientific principles. It's dumb but it's not that uncommon.
Science is great at figuring out how things work. But that's not the sole need of humanity. In the end it's a tool.

Religion also fills a human need. We should actually apply scientific principles to see what parts or religion provide a positive human experience and which parts stifle our growth. It's also a tool.

I get mocking people who are 'high on God' because that's just as silly as being high on coke or booze. Just slightly less destructive but still based on delusions.

And I get criticizing the political use of religion. That's done a bunch of harm throughout history.

But still, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The human needs that religion fill are still here because so many people still blindly follow their faith.

Also, if we're honest science causes as much death and pain as religion. Look at all the war technology we have now. The problem is human nature and society more than religion. afaict.

I was a Christian for a long time. Much of my ethical sensibilities still owe a lot to Christianity, or at least the version of it which I was drawn towards. Now I'm an atheist, and I don't think it's possible to sustain a belief in an any kind of supernatural power, although there are still philosophical meanderings on the topic that I find eloquent.

There's also many aspects of religion, especially as practiced in the US, which I think are socially problematic. The study my wife and I did of auto-biographical accounts of religious deconversion really highlighted for me how dysfunctional fundamentalist social ties can be. And politically, I tend to be opposed to the interests of conservative religious groups.

But at the same time, I think d2_e4's version of anti-theism is mostly just ignorant bigotry. Probably the best you can say for it is that he's just giving lagtight what he wants: an opportunity to feel both intellectually superior and like a suffering saint. Religion is probably the most fundamentally human of all human phenomena. It captures both the highest heights of human experience and the awfullest evils. Humani nihil a me alienum puto. To be so thoroughly anti-religious is basically to be a misanthrope. If you can't find any beauty or any deep questions worthy of reverence in the human religious experience than you just aren't trying at all.

The irony for me is that it always seems like the only people to have a worse understanding of religion than religious fundamentalists are atheist fundamentalists.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but I struggle to see how it could be a bad thing. Could you give an example?

You will never persuade me that organised religion has done more good than harm for humanity, and it's not even close. Guess that does make me a bigot in this regard, and I'm fine with that.

I can confirm that I am a misanthrope, and most likely on the spectrum, as it were, although I've never been tested.

I wonder how a guy who thinks parallel worlds might be a possibility can mock Lagtight for his views though.
That's what I meant yesterday about how "you guys" don't even know what you think and if you did know you might not be so arrogant. But you do seem to know what you think, it's crazy, and are still arrogant about it.
And I think there is a bit of "hand-waiving" (I like it) going on when you dismiss the interpretations as being just tools to come to grips with the counter-intuitiveness of QM. The various interpretations exist precisely because things are so counter-intuitive. If it all made sense everyone would likely be on the same page.

The difference is, I think learning about QM interpretations is an interesting philosophical exercise - an exercise in intellectual masturbation, if you like - I don't use it to inform my decisions or as some sort of guiding principle. And quite frankly, it matters very little to me which interpretation, if any, turns out to be the correct one. As I say, it's about the equations. Not really sure what you think is hand-wavy about that.

Regardless, I could just as easily respond that I don't "believe" in any of the interpretations, because none of them have been proven. This is probably closest to how I feel about them - my answer above was along the lines of which one I'd "like" to be true.

Imo, it should matter more. Although I'm not prepared to expound on why I think that at this present moment.
Ultimately it's because it does point to something going on behind the scenes. Treating it all as 'normal' or thinking that the equations themselves are all that matters is where the hand-waving happens. And there wouldn't be crazy interpretations to the equations unless the equations themselves are crazy.

Lagtight,
What's the strongest evidence for young earth iyo? I've never really ventured to rgt and I assume this has been covered in your posts there so forgive me for asking you to repeat yourself.

Bump for luckbox (he may have already seen this and may not be interested). It is circling around a discussion we have had before in other venues tangential to the current one.

For example, consider the phenomenon of gravity. Newton formulated equations which explained how massive bodies interacted at macroscopic scales and those equations were good enough for our purposes for a few hundred years. Many technological advances were made using those equations. How was gravity interpreted during that time? I don't know, but whatever interpretations existed of gravity 200 years ago were undoubtedly incorrect. Now we have better equations and a better interpretation - gravity is the warping of spacetime. What does that even mean? I can't visualise that, and I doubt anyone else can either.

Does that mean that 200 years ago the science behind gravity was wrong? No, the equations were missing an error term, and the interpretations were misguided. Now we have better equations, which have allowed for technological leaps (e.g. if you don't adjust for time dilation due to general relativity, your GPS would be off by something of the order of 100 metres I think). Is our current interpretation of gravity correct? Who knows, but it's certainly the best description we have for the world around us at this time. Certainly better and more useful than "goddunit". So, putting interpretations of QM on the same platform as mystical and religious beliefs is highly misguided IMO.