--In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : It's such a delight to read something written by someone who can still think, Curtis. Thanks.
The very IDEA that someone could consider Robin Carlsen or Jim Flanegin or John R rational astounds me. Thanks bro but I think Richard was being a bit facetious. He was pretty clear about the Robin routine himself. Robin was associated with these idiotic arguments and was their champion. I have been having fun lately writing here again since I am at home many days making lesson plans. With all the odd dynamics, I do think the place is vastly improved by a lack of a certain poster. It seems a bit less contentious. I guess that may not be true for you since there is a committee that is still championing the cause. I think you will relate to this video very well. It is kind of frighteningly familiar: Scientology Top Managers In Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG70fhg0wL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG70fhg0wL4 Scientology Top Managers In Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG70fhg0wL4 Three of Scientology's top management personnel ambushing a former member of scientology at Los Angeles International Airport on 10/19/14. View on www.youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG70fhg0wL4 Preview by Yahoo From: "curtisdeltablues@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 4:56 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Belief in God is a form of mental illness ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <punditster@...> wrote : On 10/20/2014 11:43 PM, jr_esq@... mailto:jr_esq@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: Xeno, I'm flabbergasted at the statements you just said. In the physical existence of human beings here on earth, everyone has to have a mother and a father. Were you not created by your father's sperm that impregnated your mother's egg? Didn't she carry you in her womb for 9 months before you were born here on earth? I'll give you my thoughts about Barker's ideas. But I'm taking the KCA argument one at a time which starts with statement 1. Your statements are so astonishing that we need more clarification about your thoughts and logic. Everyone in the forum is invited to participate in this discussion to ask Xeno about his revelations regarding his physical existence. > Everyone on this forum seems to believe in causation - that for every event there is a cause. The question is if everything that happens has a cause, is there a first cause? This is probably one of the first essay assignments in any Philosophy 101 class at a community college. Everyone knows that Aristotle defines change and motion by first concluding that everything that has a beginning and an end would have to have a first cause or principle. His argument for before and after must have an antecedent state following Parmenides statement: "nothing comes from nothing." Aristotle concluded that if the cosmos had a beginning it would require a first cause, an unmoved mover, in order to support change. Where is Robin when we need him? M: Robin didn't understand the problems with unfounded assertions either, he was fond of making them himself. If he did he would have seen through Aquinas' stated presumptions instead of being so enamored with them. In our daily life we conflate "that's logical" with "that's true" because the former requires another outside verification for its veracity. Garbage in, garbage out in logical syllogisms. In our daily life we rarely take the trouble to be so careful. The classical philosophers have two things working against them. They were blind to their own presumptive statements that had not been proven, and then were overfond of the logical conclusions they derived from them. The whole history of philosophy was spent cleaning up many of their confusions. The second problem they had in such discussions is their lack of exposure to the non intuitive wold physics and astro-geo-physics has revealed far beyond the range of our senses. A world where the rules for macro objects are sometimes ignored and that we are very poorly prepared to speculate about. It takes physicists years of deep study and advanced math to meaningfully deal with concepts so far from our natural experience. Now that we know about this level of matter, universal claims like "Everything that comes to exist has a cause." are ridiculous as an unchallenged first principle. Turns out quantum events don't follow this rule that seems so obvious to our natural senses. But even without knowing about quantum events we have learned that such universals are unwise. The Greeks were much more confident about how their world was. We have been humbled by getting our intellectual asses kicked by the growth of scientific knowledge beyond the range of our senses. Resorting to religious arguments using syllogisms are disingenuous for modern people. They trot these out to make their beliefs seem more carefully thought out. If they are probed from the perspective of their epistemology, these arguments are not really why they believe in their idea of God. They believe it for other reasons that they believe they can shield with the pretense of rationality. They want their real reasons for belief to be beyond scrutiny. I guarantee you that this argument is not even on he belief web John has built for himself so he can believe in God. It isn't even a branch on that tree.He thought it would be a useful stick to poke at non believers and it failed because he doesn't understand it himself, it just sounded authoritative. I think all the God beliefs base on scripture are idiotic because it requires someone to assume that God had a hand in writing an obviously human produced work of literature. That people entertain this notion today is beyond me, but it causes many problems in this world. I consider it a very dangerous wrong belief that someone has a book from God with details about our lives. (Like kill the infidels, or God gave us this land.) I am most sympathetic to the mystical experience claims for the existence for God having had enough experiences of my own to understand how compelling they are. I no longer believe that the actual existence of a God is the best explanation for these experiences, but I could certainly be wrong and might be proven wrong some day. But not today.
