14-year old Pakistani girl activist shot by Taliban

[derspiess]

My Wiccan sample size is only 3, but I agree.

My sample size is a bit bigger (probably 12-15), and none of them were very lovely people. That doesn't mean that I judge the entire religion based on it.

It's good enough for me.  Btw is it correct to even refer to it as one religion?

[merithyn]

In that case you'll have to admit to yourself that it is a guess and not based on knowledge. Kierkegaard's leap of faith was to guess then live as if the guess were true. My leap of faith is to guess and proceed knowing that it is a guess.

That's pretty much how I live my life, too. My guess just includes an aspect of my spirituality, and yours doesn't. I have faith that my guess is as good as any, just like you do. So where is the problem?

T

o press the issue a little further; there will never be a situation where you have literally no facts and there will almost never arise a situation that your brain cannot analogize with some previous situation you experience yourself or have been informed of by others. In almost all cases of choice we are choosing between alternatives supported by differing sets of incomplete imperfect facts. We must use the facts we have rather than invent knowledge based on non-facts.

It seems to me that you just make a judgment call based on what you believe to be an incomplete imperfect fact and what's a non-fact, but then don't accept that others may choose differing answers.

[merithyn]

My Wiccan sample size is only 3, but I agree.

My sample size is a bit bigger (probably 12-15), and none of them were very lovely people. That doesn't mean that I judge the entire religion based on it.

It's good enough for me.  Btw is it correct to even refer to it as one religion?

Wiccanism is a specific set of requirements based on a specific set of rituals and guidance, so yes. That being said, there are a lot of people who claim to be Wiccan who don't adhere to those requirements, so don't really qualify as Wiccan, per se.

It's kind of like Catholics who believe in abortion rights, birth control, women's rights, and that confession is a joke. Sure, they're kind of Catholics, but not really.

[derspiess]

Btw I had a fun conversation with my oldest brother (who is a lot more religiously conservative than I) a little while ago.  I had run into a gal he used to date back in the day and I was telling him she still looked pretty young and that he ought to look her up.

He said he had talked to her fairly recently and had also found out that she was a witch.

I said, "Oh, you mean she *thinks* she's a witch."

He replied, "No, she's a witch."

I shot back, "That implies witchcraft is something real, rather than imagined."

He said, "Yes, I know.  She's a witch."

Then I changed the subject, lest we get into a DORK-SIDED argument.

[Viking]

Precisely. The metaphysical claims of religion are not true in the material world. They are only true in the fantasy in your mind.

If that's true, why is that bad? How do my mental gymnastics that help me lead a happier more fullfilled life matter to you in the least?

The diabetic believes that sugar will not harm him, the HIV+ person believes he will not infect, the mother believes her children will go to heaven after she drowns them, the jihadi believes that his act of martyrdom will provide places in heaven for 20 of his closest relatives.

If you cannot see why these real-life examples of fantasy cause harm then I don't think anything can convince you.

Facts are. Reality is usually not enough for most people, that is why there are religions. If spirituality is pretending that a fantasy is true then it is not only BS, but harmful BS.

Harmful? Pretending? My mental gymnastics to lead a better life are very real to me, and it does help guide me to being a better person. And it is my reality. Just as two witnesses seeing an accident tell two different stories, two people who live a similar life can do so very differently, having two very different "realities". Because it's not yours doesn't make mine any less real.

Thats the tricky thing about reality, it is real. Reality shatters your fantasy when they are confronted every time (unless you start constructing convoluted religious or conspiracy theories to explain away the dissonance). There is only one reality. Your fantasy (or my fantasy) doesn't count. The only honest thing we can to is our best to make sure that our internal mental fantasies do not contradict reality.

Again. What is spirituality?

Sprituality is believing that there there is guidance from the spirit or soul. It can be intuition, going with the heart, or following the direction set down by another to lead a life that helps build continuity with the soul. It's a recognition that the soul goes beyond matter and that it is just as important.

We know the material mechanisms in the brain that generate such intuitions.

Where does this guidance come from? How can we know that source is reliable? How can we know there  is such a thing as a soul? When does the soul start, what is the soul, why can changes in the brain change the person if the person is a soul?

If you are going to claim that there is such a thing as a soul you are going to have to give good answers to all of these questions.

I don't have to accept anybody else's delusions as relevant and I get to mock them if people pretend that their delusions should matter to me.

Actually, yes, you're right, you do. But in doing so you close yourself off entirely from a different perspective of life and limits your personal horizons. It means that your experiences in life are that much more shallow and colorless. It also closes you off from a large portion of the population who won't deal with you deciding that their reality is flawed and yours is the only "right" one.

And I'll be honest. I don't have a lot of desire to interact with a small, petty tirant who believes that his reality is the only valid one.

I don't close myself off from other perspectives, I just insist that your perspective is not pure invention on your part. I do not limit my personal horizons because I have a mechanism for abandoning cherished ideas which you do not. I test my ideas for truth and my perspectives for relevance.

Look, I want to live in a world where I am married to a blind-mute-nymphomaniac-brewery heiress, that belief can give me comfort and hope as well as give my life depth and colour. It just isn't true, my credit card will be rejected, I'll come home to an empty apartment rather than a mansion, my fridge will not be filled with beer and I will not get fantastic sex. The truth of your ideas matter. If you want to say that your ideas give you comfort, just don't pretend they are anything but fantasy.

[merithyn]

Btw I had a fun conversation with my oldest brother (who is a lot more religiously conservative than I) a little while ago.  I had run into a gal he used to date back in the day and I was telling him she still looked pretty young and that he ought to look her up.

He said he had talked to her fairly recently and had also found out that she was a witch.

I said, "Oh, you mean she *thinks* she's a witch."

He replied, "No, she's a witch."

I shot back, "That implies witchcraft is something real, rather than imagined."

He said, "Yes, I know.  She's a witch."

Then I changed the subject, lest we get into a DORK-SIDED argument.

The whole witchcraft thing is pretty interesting to me, especially given my take on differing realities.

I mean, is witchcraft just moving the table across the room without touching it, turning princes into frogs, etc? Or can it be altering a person's perspective on things via some kind of trance? Obviously, the first can't happen no matter how much you want to try to believe that it does. But the second can, kind of. I mean, it can't change facts, but it can change how a person reacts to the world, which can make real changes happen. In which case witchcraft is kind of real. But my natural aversion to saying things like that because of the first perspective makes me hesitant to argue it in any real fashion.

Take Tarot cards, for instance. I do not believe that Tarot dictate the future. However, I do believe that they can guide a person to make different choices for themselves. So, in that way, they're an effective tool for the finding out the future of a person. So long as the individual believes what he or she is seeing/hearing, it works.

It's very confusing for me, because my natural inclination is to mock this kind of thing, but when I really think about it, I can't. Those things are no different than my own beliefs at the core of it.

[Neil]

If something can have real effects on the material world it is real in the material world.

This is where you overstepped.

[Viking]

You are conflating two different statements

"I believe that x = true"

and

"x = true"

both are beliefs that affect the outside world, but "x = true" is either true or not true independent of your belief or even your existence or ability to hold any belief at all.

I'm not conflating them. One has a truth value that is independent of belief and one has a truth value that is not. Both need to be accounted for. I do not hold to the belief that simply dismissing one of them makes it irrelevant. One might call that a fantasy.

No, both statement have truth value independent of belief. One is a statement about a fact about x, the other is a statment about a fact about your state of belief. No belief is required for either statement to be true or false. They are either true or false independent of my belief in their truth or falseness.

The only fact that is relevant about a belief is it's existence. Belief has no effect on truth.

[Viking]

In that case you'll have to admit to yourself that it is a guess and not based on knowledge. Kierkegaard's leap of faith was to guess then live as if the guess were true. My leap of faith is to guess and proceed knowing that it is a guess.

That's pretty much how I live my life, too. My guess just includes an aspect of my spirituality, and yours doesn't. I have faith that my guess is as good as any, just like you do. So where is the problem?

Which. Mine or Kirkegaard's?

To press the issue a little further; there will never be a situation where you have literally no facts and there will almost never arise a situation that your brain cannot analogize with some previous situation you experience yourself or have been informed of by others. In almost all cases of choice we are choosing between alternatives supported by differing sets of incomplete imperfect facts. We must use the facts we have rather than invent knowledge based on non-facts.

It seems to me that you just make a judgment call based on what you believe to be an incomplete imperfect fact and what's a non-fact, but then don't accept that others may choose differing answers.

How you use your facts is not the point here. We can have the same facts and come to different conclusions. Non-facts are units of information that are not facts.

[merithyn]

Look, I want to live in a world where I am married to a blind-mute-nymphomaniac-brewery heiress, that belief can give me comfort and hope as well as give my life depth and colour. It just isn't true, my credit card will be rejected, I'll come home to an empty apartment rather than a mansion, my fridge will not be filled with beer and I will not get fantastic sex. The truth of your ideas matter. If you want to say that your ideas give you comfort, just don't pretend they are anything but fantasy.

You're refusing to see the good for the bad. All you can focus on is the negative affects of religion, and you've transcribed that to mean that everything that has to do with religion and spirituality is wrong, bad, and worthless (or worse, damaging) fantasy.

Spirituality made Mother Theresa save millions of lives. It helped Mahatma Ghandi direct a nation and a world toward peace. On the smaller scale, it guides my ideals and my ethics to be a positive, caring, understanding individual. It's helped me face things that might have destroyed another person. It's kept me sane during insane times, and it's helped me become the person that I am. It works in a very positive way for me, personally, every day of my life. That is enough for me to be perfectly happy with my trumped up fantasies and chemically-induced intuition.

It's also taught me to be accepting of other perspectives, seeing beauty where before I may have found confusion or disgust. Your way of looking at all of this has caused you to only see the negative, unhappy aspects of life. How can that possibly persuade anyone that your reality is the better one?

[Martinus]

Meanwhile, a pregnant teenage girl died in Poland of an intestine cancer because doctors refused to perform chemotherapy on her because, being devout Catholics, they thought it would be tantamount to an abortion.

Well, it's aborted now, isn't it? 

I'm seriously starting to become more and more like Viking when it comes to religion, if only because of how the most popular religions abuse women. We seriously need a good push toward goddess-based religions to take hold if only for the sake of women.

Religion isn't either the problem or the solution. The problem is that the folks who happen to follow these particular religions tend to be from conservative societies. They follow religions and they follow traditional ways concerning the status of women for the same reason - because they are, basically, from a backward, medieval-style culture. The world has moved on and they have not.

Replacing their current religions with women-friendly woo cannot solve the problem - or rather, if you could change their culture to be more modern in its attitude towards women, why not simply change it to one that lacks woo altogether?

We had this discussion many times before so in short: any religion espouses the GIGO fallacy. So it is bad in the end.

[derspiess]

The whole witchcraft thing is pretty interesting to me, especially given my take on differing realities.

I mean, is witchcraft just moving the table across the room without touching it, turning princes into frogs, etc? Or can it be altering a person's perspective on things via some kind of trance? Obviously, the first can't happen no matter how much you want to try to believe that it does. But the second can, kind of. I mean, it can't change facts, but it can change how a person reacts to the world, which can make real changes happen. In which case witchcraft is kind of real. But my natural aversion to saying things like that because of the first perspective makes me hesitant to argue it in any real fashion.

It's still imagined IMO. 

Take Tarot cards, for instance. I do not believe that Tarot dictate the future. However, I do believe that they can guide a person to make different choices for themselves. So, in that way, they're an effective tool for the finding out the future of a person. So long as the individual believes what he or she is seeing/hearing, it works.

Okay, so it can randomize decisions.  Doesn't make it any more real to me.  Stuff like that (like scapulancy) used to have an actual real value (randomizing hunting areas, thus preventing over-hunting) but I don't see value it today's world.

It's very confusing for me, because my natural inclination is to mock this kind of thing, but when I really think about it, I can't. Those things are no different than my own beliefs at the core of it.

I'm okay with mocking it.  It's not like anyone mocking my religion in return would bother me any.

[The Brain]

What can be alarming to non-religious people is the insistence of many religious people that human children playing in the sun have little or no intrinsic value. That they have value only if the Sky-Father made them.

[garbon]

Except that you eventually have to act as though something is true - unless you are just going to stay paralyzed by not knowing.  Mundane example - choosing to believe that one's spouse is not cheating on one. In many cases, it isn't really possible to be certain that such is the case but one either has to act as though that's true or end the relationship. Anything in between will just be needlessly painful.

In that case you'll have to admit to yourself that it is a guess and not based on knowledge. Kierkegaard's leap of faith was to guess then live as if the guess were true. My leap of faith is to guess and proceed knowing that it is a guess.

To press the issue a little further; there will never be a situation where you have literally no facts and there will almost never arise a situation that your brain cannot analogize with some previous situation you experience yourself or have been informed of by others. In almost all cases of choice we are choosing between alternatives supported by differing sets of incomplete imperfect facts. We must use the facts we have rather than invent knowledge based on non-facts.

Except that weighing heavily into a decision would be the thoughts of others. If many people I know are Christians, why wouldn't that be a point in favor of inclining me to believe in the Christian god? Who am I to reject out of hand what so many of my peers see so easily?

[merithyn]

It's still imagined IMO. 

Sure, but so is taking communion, unless you truly believe that you're eating the body and blood of Christ. It has an affect on you, though, or at least it did for me. I may have never believed that I was eating and drinking Christ, but I did feel as though I was part of a community who believed in his teachings. All imagination, really, but no less important to my faith at the time.

Okay, so it can randomize decisions.  Doesn't make it any more real to me.  Stuff like that (like scapulancy) used to have an actual real value (randomizing hunting areas, thus preventing over-hunting) but I don't see value it today's world.

But if it helps someone make a positive change in their life, isn't that an actual real value? Would it make it more of an actual real value if that person then went on to build a hospital for children, or to work harder to find a cure for cancer? At what point does it become more real and more valued?

I'm okay with mocking it.  It's not like anyone mocking my religion in return would bother me any.

That's perfectly fair, I just don't see the point. Going back to value, where is the value in judging how another finds peace?