To Jason: >>Atheism, in its naivety, rejects all these possibilities without even >>realizing it has done so.
How can you possibly speak for atheists generally in this regard? Particularly after the arguments you have been making! What do you know of all the possibilities they have entertained or whether and how they have rejected them? >>The word atheist is either meaningless (if it applies to specific or certain >>God/gods), or it is inconsistent/unsupported if you apply it to more general >>definitions of god. It's a word that seems to carry less than 1 bit of >>information. How does the word become meaningless if it is applied to a specific God? Up until now you have been arguing that it is the vast variety of meanings the word God can convey that has been the problem, now it is a problem when the meaning is narrowed down? I beginning to think for you 'atheist' is just a useless word because that is how you want things to be. I also don't get how the word 'atheist' is inconsistent if the definition of God is broader. The word atheist depends on two things to be correctly applied. Firstly, that I have something in mind when I use the word God, and that I don't believe it exists. I would be inconsistent if I said i didn't believe in this thing, when actually I did. >>n that case everyone is an atheist, as you could cook up any definition of >>some God that person will not believe in. Its a point many atheists make. Jews don't believe Christ was the son of God. Christians don't believe in endless cycles of reincarnation. Relative to both, atheists just lack one further belief. they are all atheists relative to one another. But you're not really getting me. The point was that the word 'atheist' conveys some information regardless of how God is defined and therefore clearly has utility. That if I call someone an atheist you know something about him even before you know his definition of God. ie. that he has one, and that he doesn't believe in it. In other words 'atheist' has use and meaning before we even begin to get into your muddle about the meaning of 'God'. >> Free thought is also more in line with the a genuine scientific attitude, >> whereas many sects of atheism are prone to authority and dogmas. Well I would disagree with you there. That sounds like scientism to me. Also, I don't like the blind assumption that thoughts come freely rather than that they are determined. Moreover, I don't think there is a single kind of attitude that is 'genuinely scientific'. I suspect Galileo and Einstein were probably extremely pig headed and dogmatic, whereas Feynman and Darwin liked to play with ideas. All of them made progress in science. I get anxious when I hear people define what scientists should be like. Whatever gets the job done, I say. But thats another argument. From: marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Hitch Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:59:16 +0200 On 09 Jul 2013, at 22:58, John Mikes wrote:(See below): I do not fall for Brent's quip that you want to impose your extended (non-religious?) religion on us, so I continue. Whatever you call 'religious' is continuation of millenia-long habits, hard to break. The Hindus have different ones - yet it IS religion. Atheists? Atheism? comes within the package. I am agnostic, BUT not in the God-related sense - agnostic of anything all we can state as 'knowable'. Including proof, evidence, and - yes - appearance, (of course "testability" included) what you use FOR the mind-body fantasy. It appears to our human 'mind' (in our latest human logic). What I am agnostic about. But logic and proofs are for communicating theories, that is beliefs. Not knowledge. Logic is the most agnostic things we can met. *Now about my 'Steckenpferd': natural numbers. I asked you so many times to no avail. ? You hide behind "it is SSOOO simple that you cannot explain it by even simpler cuts" or something similar. I explained why it has to be like that. But we can agree on some axioms that I have given. In my 'narrative' I figured that pre-caveman looking at his HANDS, FEET, EYES, and found that PAIR makes sense. (2, not 1). Then (s)he detected that PAIR consists of - well, - a PAIR, meaning 2 similars of ONE. And (s)he counted: ONE, ONE, PAIR (=TWO.) Quite possible. The rest may not exceed the mental capabilities of conventional anthropologists. Here we go into the NATURAL numbers. Some other animals got similarly into 3, 5, maybe the elephant into even more. Some birds can count up to 36. They begin to make aggressive sonf when they heard 36 songs of their species in the neighborhood. I read this a long time ago, ---I have not verified this. Then came the originators of the subsequent Roman (what I know of) numbering - looking at a HAND counting fingers. The group on a palm looks like a V, so it represented 5. With 2 drawn together at their pointed end for 10 (No decimal idea at this point). Four was too much, to count, so they took 1 off from the V: IV, (repeated later as IX etc.) and when it came to 4 X-s they got bored and drew only 2 lines recangulary together for 50, -- 40 similarly marked as XL (49 as IL). Remember: subtracting was different in ancient Rome, you also included the start-up figure and subtracted it like 9-3 = (9,8,7) = 7 as the original old Julian calendar counted the dates, e.g. today: July 9: "ante diem septimum (7) Idus Julii" (the 7th day before the Idus of July) because July is a MILMO month when the Idus is not on the 13th as usual, but on the 15th). And NO ZERO, please. So I doubt that the 'natural numbers' created the world. That expression is misleading. All theories assumes the natural nulmbers, and what I show, is that if we are machine, it is undecidable if there is anything more. If we are machine, arithmetic (number + their addition and multiplication laws) is enough to explain the origin of a web of dreams and how the physical realities becomes apparent for the relative number points of view. And my point is not that this is true, but that this is empirically refutable. Humans created the natural numbers. Just like they created the not-so-naturals (irrationals, infinites, you name them). Is that not anthropocentrism? And where the humans come from? Bruno John M On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 5:25 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: John, On 08 Jul 2013, at 23:03, John Mikes wrote: After some million years of 'mental' development this animal arrived at the 'mental' fear. Usurpers exploited it by creating superpowers to target it with assigned intent to help, or destroy. The details were subject to the 'founders' benefit of enslaving the rest of the people into their rule. Such unquestionable tyranny lasted over the past millennia and it takes a long, hard, dangerous work to get out of it. The USA Constitution (18th c.) stepped ahead in SOME little political and economical ways, yet only a tiny little in liberating the people from the religious slavery: a so called 'separation' of state and church (not clearly identified to this day). The problem is that once we separate religion from state, people still continue to be "religious" (authoritative) on something else. But it was a progress. Now we know that we have to separate also health from the state. Th French revolution similarly targetted the religion, yet today - after numerous vocal enlightened minds - the country is still divided between Christian and Islamic fundamentalist trends. Yes (even more clearly when including atheists in the christians). In my view an 'atheist requires a god to disbelieve (deny?). Indeed. Many atheists seems to take more seriously the Christian Gods than most christians theologians, who can seriously debate on the Aristotle/Plato difference. Matter is figmentous and the 'origins' are beyond our reach. It is certainly beyond any form of certainty, but simple theories (conjecture, ides, hypotheses) might exist. In particular the idea that we are machine can explain the origin of mind and matter appearances, in a testable way, except for the origin of the natural numbers which have to remain a complete mystery beyond reach of all machines. Physical is a level of human development and there is infinite unknown - unknowable - we don't even guess. OK. Just musing Thanks for that, Bruno John M On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: On 08 Jul 2013, at 19:53, meekerdb wrote: On 7/8/2013 1:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Jul 2013, at 02:45, meekerdb wrote: On 7/7/2013 6:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Jul 2013, at 07:28, meekerdb wrote: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/06/god_is_not_great_christopher_hitchens_is_not_a_liar/ I love Christopher Hitchens. I agree with many points. He is more an anticlerical than an atheist to me ... Everybody called him an atheist. He called himself an atheist. I think you just don't like the term. "atheism" is different in America and in Europa, although I have realized now that some atheists in America might be similar, but not Hitchens. Many people confuse agnosticism and atheism. Some atheists maintains the confusion to hide that they are believers (in "matter" and in the non existence of God). I don't know any atheists who are shy about their belief that matter exists and God doesn't. That is the problem. Many people, and dictionaries, confuse agnosticism="that whether or not God exists is unknown" That's the usual mundane sense of the word. with agnosticism="that whether or not God exists is impossible to know". That's a technical view by some philosophers. I agree with Sam Harris that "atheist" is not a very useful appellation because it only describes someone in contrast to "theist". It just means they fail to believe in a God who is a person and whose approval one should seek. Pebbles and chimpanzees fails too, but are not atheists in any reasonable sense. Most vindicative atheists really believe that god does not exist, and then they believe in a primitively material universe, even a Boolean one (without being aware of this in particular). Also, many religions and theologies have other notion of Gods. As Harris points out we don't invent words like awarmist to describe one who fails to believe there is global warming or anummerist to describe someone who's not sure about the existence of numbers. Yes. I heard a catholic bishop, taking about a book written by a Belgian atheist, saying that the atheists are "our allies", "they keep advertising for us and (our) God" Then, at least around here, "Matter" is such a dogma that you can get problem when you dare to doubt it, "apparently" --- because they don't practice dialog, and ignore the embarrassing questions. They don't practice science in the matter. For them you are just mad if you doubt ... basically the same theology of matter than the christians. Greek theology is allowed to be studied by historians, not by mathematicians. The atheists I know fight more the agnostic (in the mundane sense) than the radicals of any religion. Political correctness makes easy to defend 2+2=5, and impossible to defend 2+2=4. We are all believers, and when a machine pretend to be a non believer, it means "I know", and she will impose her religion to you, by all means. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
