Comments by "LancesArmorStriking" (@LancesArmorStriking) on "The Young Turks"
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TheTurinturumbar
Respect, in the context which I speak of, does not equate to acknowledging any truth in a belief. It means keeping your opinion neutral to mine, regardless of what you believe it to be. There is no hurdle to jump over when having respect for somebody's possession of an opinion; everybody can do that due to the fact that nobody can suppress anybody else's thoughts. I simply expect you, as a normal person, to reasonably present your own argument instead of blatantly bashing mine with no evidence to boot. I would like to know on which planet (subjective, anyway) by common moral standards it is acceptable to insult somebody's entire worldview and act like a 5 year-old in the process.
As for the discrepancy, I have no reason to believe what you say. If what you say isn't true, then why should I believe that a Communion should be held at the same esteem as a Latin pancake recital? Your opinion is in the public eye, and most people have a hierarchy of ideals to live by instead of only targeting those that they don't like and trying to get rid of them. As for your example, I personally agree with you there; I see no significance in Sacraments, but understand that your opinion is just as subjective as mine, and by your definition holds no true value.
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Yes, neutral towards me. I'd really appreciate it if you were. If you refuse to even respect me on a very shallow level, then I can definitively conclude that you're a horrible person.
I can't take your argument seriously while you keep misspelling "ridicules."
That actually wasn't very insulting. Insulting a person's entire belief; what they stand for, is far worse than some half-Norman curse words you sling at me.
I find it fascinating that atheists, who so often pride themselves of being "freethinkers" (which is B.S.) and who are constantly searching for new knowledge- especially in biology- refuse to use the unknown as a benchmark or an inspiration for what they can achieve. Jesus' resurrection may not be possible now by conventional means, but what if scientists 200 years from now discover a dormant gene in the skin's DNA that allows telomeres to regrow and the dermis to regenerate? Religion is a faith, not a science. The two should not have to clash. They should help one another, that would be much more productive.
I would still respect that person's opinion, regardless of its vileness. That isn't to say I won't try to convince him otherwise or tell somebody before he hurts someone, because there is (contrary to what you apparently think) a huge gap between believing in a hell and creating one on Earth.
You're correct, people of another worldview will unfortunately go to Hell in the Christian doctrine. That's just how we see it. But that does not make us infinitely worse than a person who actively hates people. Christians (in theory) should love everyone, regardless of the sins that they've committed. Our job is to prevent people from Hell. All a person has to do is to sincerely confess Jesus as savior once. As an added bonus, you can become a deist if you want. You keep the evolution (which is only slightly contradictory to the Bible) the quantum physics, etc. And you'd be saved. You'd just have to confess.
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TheTurinturumbar
Fine. You got me there, but respect does not mean that you do me the great honor of insulting my beliefs by calling them irrational. That is not an exchange of ideas, that is an argument waiting to happen.
I never said that I didn't respect your opinion or that your horrible grammatical skill made it any less reasonable. Those were all your assumptions. I don't see what favor you think you're doing for me by correcting yourself, but if you think that you're somehow making me feel stupid for accusing you, you're not.
I still don't see any point in reiterating whatever that slur of curses was; let's just assume that you're correct in saying that it's a vicious attack to get it out of the way.
You're correct, then I'd have evidence of God's existence. However, trying to prove a non-physical concept is impossible, which is why we have faith in the idea that Jesus is our savior. The issue with trying to prove a human concept is that our knowledge of salvation can only be "a priori." Sad but true. I didn't even start a conversation with you; you just butted in of your own justification (your ideas will be "Shot down". They will not simply be shot down, that is the decision of the commenter. I'm fine with that, but you have to present your own evidence. You haven't shown me any reason why God is irrational.) You are basing evidence on a good physical basis, which is fine for observing phenomenon that are practical in our everyday lives.However, relying on realism (a subjective worldview) to assess a faith whose existence isn't bound by realism is not a good strategy. You haven't even set the boundaries for what is rational, so why should I believe that "rationality" is some universal concept? Rationality, as stated before, changes with what we discover can be possible. By definition, if my belief is in line with my reason to believe (which I've said before: Makes me happy), it is rational.
If a person assuredly will not hurt anyone or create a hell on earth, then what reason should anybody have to change his ideas? I don't recall ever hearing that you can be a moral policeman who beats anybody that doesn't fit within a "rational" understanding of the world. Why should anyone care if that one person isn't a carbon copy of you?
In any case, you're correct. We all deserve to go to Hell, but not because we're monsters or because we're infinitely less perfect than God. You seemingly willingly, actively distort the way that Christians see Hell. We don't want to go to Hell, and we don't support that God sends people to it; neither does He. It is simply in His own policy that sinful people cannot go to Heaven. I do not actively wish or endorse that fact that Hell is even a place to go, We deserve it, but we don' think that people deserve it in an active sense; it a passive "default area." The only remaining place to go. I already said that our job is to prevent people from going there. If that doesn't get through your thick skull, I don't know what will.
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TheTurinturumbar
I'll "disregard" the first part of your argument since we seem not to have starkly contrasting ideologies there. Not trying to ignore what you said, I'm just tired of it.
Now, starting with, "Rationality does not change.."
You may think that my faith is ambiguous, and that's perfectly fine. I am perfectly fine with reason being thrown out the window. That is the truth; you cannot prove or disprove anything because we, as humans, rely heavily on one logical assumption or another (in your case, realism) to prove things "rational." Faith is an anchor for me, if an irrational one, because it cannot be disproven or proven any more than "the sky is blue" can. The evidence is just fun for me to ponder. Summed up: I acknowledge my irrationality despite learning swathes of it (which is subjective anyway) but I enjoy my faith because it makes me happy.
You just created an "us" (non-religious) and "them (religious)." Guess what else that has led to throughout history? You also used him as an example for my obligation to oppose an assumedly ghastly idea but later propose that he isn't so bad after all? Keep consistent with the pictures that you paint of people, please.
Sinful people is all of us, yes. We are all born with ancestral sin and the counter keeps rising after that. Only after we A) commit a sin in hatred and B) Reject God do really go to Hell. Why should a person's involvement in an action automatically mean that I support it? Just because I oversee a reconstruction of a basketball court into a prison to house my murderer-cousin means that I want to do it?
Would I stop him? No. There is no place for them to go to. In my perception, these would be (and are) normal people that go to Hell, but they simply can't go anywhere else. God won't defy Devil's will not to have them there (crazy as it sounds) and He won't defy people's will (knowledge of the world and its perceived functions) while they reside on Earth. So, we end up in a situation where God could only intervene into an area where everybody had the concept of a deity in their heads (ancient Israel) and had no reason to intervene after (Catholic Church probably rigged the timeline) ~33 CE. So, sure. According my morality, God is doing something wrong (would love it if everyone could spend eternity with Him) but he is doing what is necessary.
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TheTurinturumbar
Have you not remembered the whole point of you starting this conversation with me? I was annoyed with you butting in (which is obviously allowed, no need to correct me there professor) and that you had no sense of common courtesy with the way you blatantly denounced my argument whilst not producing any reasons or counter-evidence. I did not waste all that time and energy going into the rationality of my religion, that's what you dragged me into. I do believe that, within the mutually established boundaries of realism, religion holds 'rational' value, but we've been discussing the objective value of theism and anti-theism. So that's why I threw it out the window, and would prefer if you didn't attempt to bring it back into the house. You did not defend your position on the innate subjectivity of the universe through human perception, and I'll probably die five times before anyone can do so.
Science, by its bare definition, is the careful observation of the world through experimentation. There are plenty of christian scientists who do this, as well as the famous quasi-scientists - children. I believed in god as a child, and was always looking for new things to know. Did I not, to some extent, do science? Back to fairy tales. I'm not sure if you're referring to my religious belief, or what I said about subjectivity. If it's the former, you have yet to disprove the rationality of it because of your own assumptions about reality and many other things (uneven distribution of gasses after the big bang, more matter than anti-matter, dark energy, the constant acceleration of the universe going faster and faster- must have started from no speed at all, the creation of life, etc.) I'm just as curious as you are about the naturalistic processes that took place with these events, but I don't choose to isolate my five primary senses as tool for doing so. If it's the latter - subjectivity- you haven't defended that.
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*****
That's a fair example, and I'm sorry that your children had to go through that, but you're grossly oversimplifying a crucial factor here. You're trying to make religion and judgement upon others mutually exclusive, when it's a universal trait of children to notice others' differences. I myself was insulted by my fellow classmates from preschool to elementary school for having glasses. This is the case with 99% of my friends as well for various other traits of theirs, and I'm almost certain that it's happened to you or you've seen it happen in one form or another.
Religion, in your case, was just the means by which those kids decided to be brutally honest with yours. (Not saying that your kids will go to hell, they were just telling them exactly what they knew.)
While it's true that Christianity, Catholicism in particular, has some negative connotations and ill effects- as was seen when one of Bill Cosby's recently outspoken victims did what he told her to because she was told in Catholic school to obey authority- it does not mean that religion as a whole is bad. Christianity in particular calls not to judge others (Romans 14: 1-13) or if you must, judge yourself of the same thing first. You said you lived in the Bible Belt. I don't know how closely people actually follow Scripture there, but if the adults tried to prevent their kids from judging yours, or at least did not address your lack of belief in a similar manner, then you'd have no reason to assume that this generation in particular is 'ruined' because of religion. You might not believe me, understandably so, due to how traumatic it must have been to hear your child ask you if he was going to hell, but please take into consideration the fact that these are children, and they change over time. You, in effect, judged them in the same way they did your child.
A history lesson, if I may. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest still-standing religious hierarchies in the world. It was, during the Reformation, accused of selling remittances to "Purgatory" and was duly weakened. Many European settlers that first migrated into America were Protestant, and the Catholic Church only managed to slip in later on. So it makes sense, with its reputation for corruptness and a small population to begin with (although it is now the largest) that it would steadily decline. And, from my own firsthand experience, I can understand why nobody goes to Catholic Church. It's boring as hell :). I'd also like to mention that, when I went to Catholic school, I did not like the idea of Purgatory (it's fake) and challenged my teachers because of it in spite of practicing the same general religion.
Now what I don't understand here is why you try to generalize religion as a whole with your bad experience, or that you say that religion is the enemy of education. Religion, in a purely pragmatic sense, is a form of education. Religion, I will say firsthand, is the enemy of deep thought, but aside from doing epistemology and cosmology lessons from scratch, there is no reason why religion should hinder established subjects' credibility in the minds of young people. If it does, that's not good, but it can be fixed.
That last statement is indeed true- are you implying that it makes religion worse? Much of what you have today, including your own existence, is because of Byzantine Christian and Islamic scholars providing the resources necessary for Europe to come out of its Middle Ages shambles and prosper. My final point: do not generalize; think for yourself. Atheism can and will, if left unchecked, do the same as religion does today, only with the roles reversed.
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*****
You've missed my point. Children, naturally being judgmental, will notice differences among their peers, and religion, despite being "brainwashing," is no more useful as a social-splitting tool than atheism would be in a largely atheistic society. Your point about not believing is a bit moot as (from the children's perspective) if they don't believe, then there is no hell to them; as you said.
Creationism, I also believe, is a bit shaky in terms of the world's origins, but you have not provided a reason for your not believing in a deity. I find that the very nature of the universe without a deity itself requires many other leaps of faith that you clearly do have. You believe in naturalism, which you as an atheist cannot deny. You believe in realism, and the idea that our brains accurately pick up what we perceive. Looking at theism from an Occam's Razor perspective, theism is much more logical to believe in; it only assumes one thing. You cannot rely on intuition to tell you what to believe in, that is intellectually dishonest for an atheist ("In my thinking it is... absurd").
My problem with atheism, as you have mentioned, is that it has no ethos; no moral hierarchy coupled with masses of inconsistencies. For example: morality. Some atheists such as yourself say that there is no set of rules. In that case, what is technically stopping you from committing adultery, slaughtering your family, and robbing a bank in all one day if there is no objective morality tied to atheism? You would only suffer a gunshot or, at worst, years of your life, and then it would be all over. Nobody would deliver justice to those harmed, end of story. Those who object to this in any way immediately compromise their own consistency because their opinion of right and wrong indicates a moral code. Atheism can be held responsible for negative things if somebody uses the justification of subjective morality to defend a crime that they commit, as mentioned above. Like it or not, atheism has implications of its own that cannot be denied. Otherwise you'd just be running away from the problem.
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I agree, Americans are extremely gullible. So are Russians, but only in certain contexts. Usually we are stone-faced and analytical, but when we (they, really) have their sense of national pride toyed with, they become very tribal and defensive. Stupid, even.
Also, behavioral psychology doesn't always work. There are too many factors at play to have a direct cause --> effect relationship. For example, simply being aware of the tactics makes you less susceptible to them, so long as you remain self-aware in the moments where the trick is being employed.
Also, you can mitigate the effects of the grocery store by having a list, and forming a habit that counters the default psychological inclination.
Same goes with McDonald's. Red and yellow may mean "hungry!", but not if you know what they put in the food.
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