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From 25:40 to 34:00. It's about the idea that the need for religiosity is innate to the human mind; thus things like secularism breed their own religiosity, one that tends to lead towards ill health of a civilization.
I'm an atheist, and I think I agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01yQ30tRo-0
Too bad no play.
I quite like the idea that Marxism is one of the main religious manifestations of atheism.
"I'm a religious jew" "Fighting the irrational is very hard... if people have a vested interest in believing something you cannot talk them out of it"
If you were to prod him on how his superstition is different from secular superstition you'd get a lot of special pleading.
His theory is that everyone has a superstition bubble in their brain that needs to be filled up and if we don't fill it up with god, we fill it up with other irrational ideas. So to falsify that you'd have to look at the willingness of theists and atheists to believe irrational ideas. I'm having a hard time finding studies that deal with that correlation. I'd look into pseudoscience and what demographic buys into specific ones like homeopathy, chiropractic, astrology. I have no hard numbers but I would would bet that the numbers not only falsify, but completely turn around on his argument.
"If there is no god there is no good and evil"
I'm positive that if we dig deeper we'd get some variant of the ontological argument which is so easy to debunk it practically destroys itself.
I'm at 32 min. and so far this has been a giant load of bullshit with an interviewer that has no experience in dealing with the dumbfuck arguments of theists. I don't feel like wasting the other 2 unless you can promise me he'll say something even more stupid for me to laugh at.
If this is something that interest you, even though it's clicheé at this point: the most thorough compendium of dumb things religous people say and how to disprove them is still The God Dillusion, and it's well worth reading. It also has multiple chapters dealing with the question of how religions evolve and why humans buy into them.
http://www.astrology.co.uk/news/astrostats.htm
This is the closest I could get and it says at least 86% of the people who said they believe in astrology also identify as members of a religion. The actual number is likely much higher.
Without watching, i absolutely agree and it's the basis for my atheism. These questions are enormously important for people and, it seems to me obvious that people would latch onto the answers others offer up. But at their core, they're human answers to nearly impossible questions.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Think about constellations. Way back when, people looked up at the stars and had to wonder what they were, and the answers that were accepted and repeated were stories about dead ancestors or battling gods. Anyone that gave the honest to goodness truest answer they could, would be ignored. The answer is that they're enormous balls of gas that compress hydrogen and other light elements so much through their own weight that the squeeze them together into new, heavier elements releasing heat and light in the process. The next best answer? "I don't know." No one likes it, though.
The point he was actually making is that because people of faith have satisfied their need for superstition in religion, they are able to be more rational on subjects that matter. Which of course is deranged drivel.
I read an article written by a very successful guy that was remembering his teen years in retrospect. He had made a pledge to himself not to play games on the sabbath and ended up playing either basketball or soccer and had become something of a star player. The games never fell on sunday all the way up until the championship. He sat out the game even though all of his friends asked him to make an exception just this one time. The lesson he carried from that was that it's easier to follow a standard 100% of the time, than it is 95% because of the difficulty in choosing which 5%.
I suspect he was the sort of person to take personal pledges very seriously with or without the context of religion, but I think he's the kind of person people think religion could make them.
From video "The Founders understood, No God No Freedom. No God no Small gov't"
The founders understood their day and age and that they couldn't sell any idea without putting God in front of it. You shouldn't read more deeply than that.
I did not see the video, but when I saw it was Dennis Prager, I thought about Prager U. And I do not agree with 80% of wha Prager U keeps spouting on youtube.
I guess that religion has good and bad sides. Too bad its really easy to make gullible minds commit atrocities in the name of religion. Including suicide bombing and displacing of populaces.
If people only cared to do good for themselves and their fellow man, instead of caring about what somebody's interpretation of what the book said says (because let's face it, 95% or more of the so-called religious people who follow the holy books have only skimmed through it), the world would be a much better place.
The key thing is "would I like it if they did it to me?" should be central in all, instead it becomes an "us vs them" that is antithesis to what it should actually be. Never forgetting the edits that came in later, which is inevitable in such old things.
Yup, 13:30 he begins to go over why you should not root for Palestinians.
You should not root for evil. Palestinians are evil. The left sees only good and bad. The left this, the left that, yada yada. Obviously, the right is virtuous.
:facepalm:
Save some anguish and watch that one section. He says some stuff that's hard to agree with throughout the whole video. Even though I like him, I couldn't finish it once he got into the Jewish racism stuff about how they're the chosen people.
I do recall the claim being made that people of organized religion can compartmentalize; thus their superstition in one area doesn't mean they are superstitious in another area. If he said what you said, though, I don't agree with that.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
I'm sympathetic to the idea of no God no freedom. Can freedom only be established with God? Probably not. But has it been established only with God? Pretty much, yeah.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
The revolutionary idea that sparked freedom was that humans are made in the image of God and that gives them inalienable rights that supersede royalty, the state, or any other human intervention. Without that idea, well, history suggests we get manifestos that lead to things like communism. I'm not saying it's impossible to establish and grow freedom without God, but using God is how it happened historically and using God appears to be the practical way it happens in the human world.
It would probably be better phrased as "without an unprovable premise from which good and evil is derived, there is no good and evil." Just like you can have good and evil with the Christian god, you can have it with humanism if your humanism says "humans are special and have special objective rules even though we can't prove it..."Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
I think the more interesting point is that it seems to be that when societies lose the idea of an unproven objective morality, they start getting messy (and ultimately collapse). I'm okay with this idea. It makes sense to me that in order to keep civilization intact, humans have to be kept in order somehow. It can be the case that if humans are left to their rationalist devices, we're actually not that good at it and things unravel. It can be the case that to thrive, humans need a set of basic rules.
Or you can argue that as time goes on the chance a society collapses approaches 1. As seen by the fact that almost every society in history has collapsed. The vast majority of them featuring god (all of them really).
Concluding anything else is utter crap.
To clarify if the following two statements are true:
1 - The longer a society exists the more likely it is to have collapsed.
2 - The longer a society exists the more likely it is to move away from God.
Correlation, causation etc. Tiny sample size. Drawing piss poor conclusions to further agendas.
edit - There is no reason to assume that either of those statements are true.
It's a common theme with you that you present a nonsensical premise and instead of clarifying how you arrived at it and offering possible objections and how you would falsify it, you just say: "I'm ok with that premise." That is not how you make an argument. That's just rambling.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Perhaps there are better ways of conversing while trying to not make an argument.
Are you sure you're not confusing making an argument with having an argument? I find nothing unwelcome about making an argument.
Replace making an argument with presenting a hypothesis.
Exactly. I wasn't making an argument.
There may not be a correlation between a collapsing civilization and it being a religious one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Savy
It makes sense that somebody taught about magical events being real would interpret other similar purported events as real.
Just gonna leave this here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QfgDkFR5E
Carry on
"Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it..."
A+ sophistry.
I guess this thread is overdue for derailing. I always like to direct those who think that Islam is a religion of peace to: https://quran.com/ Just click literally anywhere, I'm that confident. I've done this enough to know that usually within a couple of seconds you'll come across a passage that says: those who believe in me: super cool! Those who don't: punish and torture and terrorize etc. That's pretty much all that book is. It's hundreds of pages of idiotic hate speech.
Thumbs up, Based Austrian.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
I watched half of the Fox interview Where Reza Aslan talks about his book about Jesus. The apparent consensus is that he nailed it. From what I can tell it's 5 minutes of argument from authority, regarding himself - the most embarrassing kind. And then he claims that we obviously know that jesus existed, which we obviously don't. He seems to be to historians what Ken Ham is to science.
I'll add this to clarify why it's more than just "there's lots of violence in the book."
Islam is at its core the way of Muhammad. This isn't in question; 99.999infinity Muslims agree with it. Because Muhammad was violent, violence is a fully legitimate doctrine within Islam. In order for this to not be the case, Muhammad (or at least the violent parts) would have to be delegitimized. As far as I know, there is no movement to do so and there's no scholarly backing for it.
BUT not all Muslims are violent. In fact, it is probably true that most aren't. How are they legitimizing a "way of Muhammad" doctrine that does not include one particularly important way of Muhammad? Well, as far as I can tell, they're doing it by mysticizing it and steeping it in cultural tradition. Perhaps if enough of this can be done, Islam would rid itself of its inherent violence. Yet, there still is the problem that any change in interpretation based on fundamentalism goes back to the violence. Given that textual fundamentalism is one of the most legitimate and prolific practices in all religions, this is unlikely to go away. But, hey, maybe it could.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is admit that fundamentalist Islam (Salafism) is on par with Nazism, and should be treated as such. Mysitical Islam (Sufism) is compatible with human values.
Yeah I don't hear the best things about Reza. I don't frequent the stuff he does though, so I don't see much of him.
Woe, that Day, to the deniers.Quote:
Originally Posted by oskar
This guy makes good stuff. Thanks for showing him, Jack. You found a quality channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKY5bFe_b-o
Glad you like it, the dude's production values are off the charts. I especially like the 3D spin thingamajig he does to the faces, I was looking all over on how to do that. While I may not agree with his every stance (you know I'm more of a Green Bros. kinda guy) I respect Pigeon's viewpoint and admire his proper delivery of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
You have to check out the one about the decline of the American Empire. I thought I had already linked to it somewhere around here but I'm not sure
The petrodollar thing is something I'm going to have to ask my professors about. I know that most (all?) economists don't believe it is that big of a benefit to the US economy (if at all). To me it looks more like the petrodollar dynamic is more about state vs state behavior, i.e., the US's endless battle with Russia and how controlling oil as much as possible helps the US state in its agenda to subjugate Russia.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer
It's funny, in that video, he says it's clear that the next decade will be turbulent, stressful, and uncomfortable. I couldn't disagree more. We're in a boom that is going to be one of the biggest booms that is less likely to stop under Trump than the average President. Specific to Trump is that it appears to me that he understands the essential role of expectations in economics. Furthermore it looks like the Causer of the Worst Recessions: the Federal Reserve, is slowly learning its lesson and may be unlikely to cause a fall in the growth rate of nominal gdp expectations for a long time.
It just blows my mind that the Fed is a private entity. They have the power of M0 and they are private. WTFQuote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
Muslim Community Helps Rebuild Vandalized Jewish Cemetery:
http://mashable.com/2017/02/22/muslim-americans-jewish-cemetery-jk-rowling/?utm_cid=hp-h-3#Q9eVY078V5qM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.53c49f26349a
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/us/jew...ry-vandalized/
https://www.launchgood.com/project/m...ish_cemetery#/
Refreshing to see this in these times of division
It's one of those catch-22 rationalizations that comes about due to the premise that government is an always-good.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer
In my money and banking economics class, we covered the pros and cons of the Fed being independent. We didn't once assess the pros and cons of having a money monopoly in the first place. This is one of the examples of a folly within contemporary academia. On this issue (and others), the standard has become to rationalize political beliefs instead of applying strict reason to beliefs.
To be more specific, if a government is going to create a money monopoly like the US government has with the Fed, it is probably best that it be independent. That doesn't mean it's not a problem. There are lots of problems with an independent central bank. But the evidence we have regarding dependent banks is as far as I can tell real bad.
We should ask whether or not we need a money monopoly created by the law monopoly in the first place.
Lots of good Muslims and lots of good Jews out there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer
Yup,Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
yet here we go again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYlVB2ker-4
Sarsour? The anti-woman Women's March organizer? The Sharia law one?
I find Crowder's version of TYT great.
Snopes? You mean the unchecked checkers who have been caught in bias before, who have secrecy agreements, who have the credibility of a husband and wife working out of their home?
http://16004-presscdn-0-50.pagely.ne...s/IMG_1541.jpg
http://16004-presscdn-0-50.pagely.ne...s/IMG_1542.jpg
But don't worry, romanticizing Sharia doesn't mean you are anti-woman (it does).
Those tweets are in the link I put up right before your post, with more context
^You though he'd have read it? Rookie mistake.
And? The context provided changes nothing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer
Highlighted my favorites.Quote:
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
hahaha