What should religion do for us today?
While I certainly do not believe God, as described in sacred texts, exists, I certainly do believe Spinoza's imperfect description of God is. But my question is, since God could not care less about our well being nor will change the nature of the Universe to suit our desires, then is there any value engaging in religious thought and reflection?
I found the following short presentation about global and historical thoughts of religion incredibly insightful about that question.
I found the following short presentation about global and historical thoughts of religion incredibly insightful about that question.
Comments (404)
In practice though, I believe that ideologies or philosophies, or any system of axioms accepted on faith serves as a functional equivalent to religion; I see little difference between "religious fanaticism" and partisan politics, for example.
Some people may not visit their local church, but may instead watch sermons on social media.
This is, in some ways why "church attendance statistics are archaic and flawed", much as they don't reflect one's personal level of commitment or behavior to begin with, and seem more predicated on financial goals or group statistics.
This is largely the thesis of my essay Against Fideism that we're discussing in another thread, with an important caveat: there is a difference between accepting and asserting an opinion. To say that nobody should accept anything without sufficient reason is to assert the negation of everything, without sufficient reason. To say not to assert anything without sufficient reason is to say that everyone is free to accept whatever they want for no reason at all, until sufficient reason is given to reject it.
Being against appeals to faith means being in favor of freedom to believe what you will.
(1) confidence (faith, motivation, optimism, resilience, perseverance, ...)
(2) self-discipline (a formal system of rules that you can try to keep)
The advantages of confidence and self-discipline are manifold. They are core ingredients for attaining any goal in life.
A shared concept of self-discipline is also what allows for better relationships, especially in families, which are the cornerstone of the social fabric of society. You can clearly notice that unbelievers are gradually but surely losing the ability to form families and to reproduce, which is something that the old adage already had predicted : children are a gift from God.
I am a non believer, and I have no problems reproducing!
Children in a lot of cases, even for believers, are a miscalculation of time of month. Most believers, especially the most fanatical, cannot say that they have planned to have children. They say that they just come because god sends then.
Atheism does not affect your immediate capacity to reproduce. It is a longer-term process.
Religion gives both spouses a common moral system. Absence of religion does not mean no moral system but almost surely two different ones. You cannot reasonably expect two atheists to believe the same things. That is the insidious part of it. Atheists do believe things about morality but they may not even know themselves what exactly they believe, especially, given the subtle manipulations from the public-school indoctrination system, the mass media, the commercial advertisements, and so on.
Hence, they more often than not end up with fundamentally incompatible differences, which in turn, more often than not lead to the failure of the relationship. Given the damage to children caused by divorce, the situation in the next generation can only be worse. Someone who grew up in a divorced situation is likely to repeat that pattern. So, things just get worse and worse. At some point, the damage will be so important to children that they will no longer survive into adulthood and will no longer reach a position to try to reproduce by themselves.
The current marriage (and fertility) rates are already at a historical low but not yet at their lowest, which is an error term that will be almost indistinguishable from zero.
For example, the current marriage/fertility rate does not yet reflect the impact of movements such as red pill and mgtow where men simply refuse to engage in any kind of long-term relationship. It also does not reflect that many young men do not even strive to become ready for a role as breadwinner but instead prefer to play video games; and so on. The stable point for that kind of society is marriage/fertility rate that in all terms is practically zero.
As an atheist you may still be able to reproduce but your progeny is pretty much scheduled to die out. So, you are probably just wasting your time.
With confidence and self-discipline you can overcome the demons of your past. If only you believe that you can, and have faith, you can emerge victorious. All you need to do, is to ask. If you implore and beseech our beloved Master, he will give you. Our Lord is there to guide you. The believer does not need to fear, and that is why the believer does not fear:
Thank you for the encouragement. The demons come and go. Some days I’m able to empathize with my father who couldn’t overcome his demons. Sometimes I think I have always been a bad person and somewhat deserve this. I should pray to ask for help with the mood swings.
Quoting alcontali
That is so much shit I do not even know where to start putting you straight. It is obvious that you read to much religious based literature and probable do not even know a non believer.
Quoting alcontali
My kids all know how to look after themselves and do not need to go groveling to some unknown being begging for help. When the shit hits the fan my kids will survive while yours are down on their knees trying to get divine intervention on their behalf. And it won't get them anywhere.
"Church attendance" may decline, however more people may watch Sermons on social media; what are your thoughts on this? I've seen more and more churches broadcasting on social media as of late.
And most of them have Apps to do their most important work. Collect the money.
Every business has to make a profit, so if this is just a discussion about greed or using religion as a money-making tool, I'd prefer not to go there.
In that regard, I don't see anything inherent about "religion" or formal religion than any other business model of "questionable" reputation, such as a casino.
Religion as a business, that is new! Not really.
Quoting IvoryBlackBishop
As far as I know there is no discussion about it, nearly all religions take their believers money and have no responsibility to explain where it goes. And that is a truth that does not need to be discussed.
I'd assume that credible business do provide some measure of financial accountability, so again I don't see what this has to do with "church" or "religion" as a whole, it just seems like an ubiquitous "anti-religion" gripe or rant.
I'd be tempted to say a very similar thing about most if not all "mass media", which in my honest opinion is usually just a 6th-grade reading level or ADHD substitute for reading books, regardless of the subject matter, usually predicated on sensationalist headlines.
If we are talking about religion, I don't see how those 2 words are being used.
What exactly is the business of religion?
And just how can any of the western religions be called credible?
Almost all of the "churches" belonging to the religions have some stigma attached to them. Maybe some of the individual buildings in general have not been smeared by unholy priests and pastors, but the churches have been corrupt for centuries.
This is turning into more of an anti-religion rant and less of a discussion about the finer details, so I think I'll bow out for not.
Based on what you're saying, I don't see how churches or religions would automatically be any different than any other business model.
For example, a company which sells alcohol, if you believed it promoted or was a source of alcoholism, you might have a grievance against, much as you would churches if you have negative opinion of religion, or organized religion specifically.
However, in a way, that is similar to the law of any modern nation, such as the Common Law in America or Britain, which does impose a bare minimum of morality on people by force, based on its own moral axioms (e.x. that acts such as rape or murder are inherently "immoral", and that society or the state therefore has a right to use force to prevent or punish those crimes, for example).
So your argument boils down to a sociological rant against "control", my view is that that moral axiom would lead to nihilism or anarchy, and that, to some degree, civilization is predicated on a rule of law, which from a historical perspective, is what I believe is a positive purpose which religion has served (such as in days when there was no modern distinction between "church" and state).
Sure, you could easily argue that punishing rape or murder is not comparable to forcing people to attend a Catholic Mass under threat of excommunication, or whatever, but from a sociological POV, my point still remains.
I am not ranting against religion, I am inquiring about the things you say. I have nothing against religion itself, my wife is religious.
Quoting IvoryBlackBishop
The finer details of what? To be able to say that religions have been and are useful then there should be some proof of that, what good has religion done for humanity?
Quoting Michael Lee
The answer to the question is a simple no, why bother.
The finer details of what? To be able to say that religions have been and are useful then there should be some proof of that, what good has religion done for humanity?
That's a tricky subject, however I would contest that modern systems of law and government are predicated on certain "religious" or moral axioms, such as the golden rule, and that religious systems played a role in the development of modern ones. (You can read Oliver Wendall Holmes treatise on the Common Law, for example if you're interested).
Also, usually when people attempt to define "religion", it's never done with a consistent definition - are you talking solely about "organized religion", or "churches", or about religious philosophy, theology, and things of that nature.
But you don't see people worshiping the Supreme Court, or treating the judges as priests. And you have the right to defend you actions that is given to you by those same laws.
Whereas religions say you are wrong and that is the end of it, you have to grovel to the unseen high and mighty just because another human that says that he is the voice of the high and mighty tells you to.
Tricky subject, but I assume you mean the Justices aren't held to be "infallible" or have a "god-appointed status", akin to a medieval pope or monarch?
My honest belief is that people even today can still "act" in ways like that.
If you want to use "Trump supporters" as an example, sure Trump may technically be an elected president with limited powers, however in practice his supporters or 'fanatics' can treat him like he's de facto infallible.
It would make more sense to say that religions sprang from men trying to impose laws upon others and failing. So they started to say(invent) that there was a higher power that they represented to scare the people into following the rules.
Quoting IvoryBlackBishop
Why is everything a "tricky subject"? Yes I mean just that. Bosses and leaders have been around a lot longer that religions based on an unseen, all knowing, all powerful god.
I don't agree with that assessment but to each their own.
Are you an anarchist? What is your ideal form of government?
(This isn't "science" itself nor conflatable with "atheism", but rather blind faith or trust in scientists, or in Bacon's 17th century scientific method, based on induction or arguments from authority, rather than personal expertise or having invented the methodology or the theories themselves, such as a teleological faith in "science" or "scientists" in general as a specific institution, often based on pop culture myths regarding its development and its various key figures, which don't actually stand up to history).
Which even during the Enlightenment era In which it originated, was and still is not the only school of thought available. (For example, evolutionary though has been a subject of philosophy as far back as the pre-Socratic philosophers, as well as contemporaries of Darwin such as Holmes, so the popular myth which gives Darwin sole credit for the theory may be historically inaccurate or false).
Much as how most mass media which "promotes" science is based on outdated 19th century information, and marketed to the 6th grade reading level, so most popular positive sentiments or affirmations expressed about "science" as a method or an institution (often falsely conflating science and natural scientific theories with other things to begin with) aren't based on higher level expertise, such as an actual Newton or Einstein, but just on faith in scientific media and propaganda, or personal bias toward one's industry on behalf of low-level employers in a natural scientific field or who hold a "scientist" title regardless of what their actual work or job description consists of.
But please tell me where I am wrong.
Quoting IvoryBlackBishop
:lol: :rofl: :cry: I am I don't give a shitist.
Quoting IvoryBlackBishop
I really cannot say that any of the world's governments and political systems really attract me. Most of them are screwed up versions of what they proclaim to be.
I am a dreamer and I believe that a good system would be one that provides people with what they have earned and deserve. But that does not exist and probably never will.
Scientism is neither a religion nor a system of government, it is a way of thinking and living.
I agree, my argument is just that it's a modern example of people acting or thinking in quasi-"religious" way.
As far as theological or philosophical thoughts on God or a higher power, I don't believe that all of it was simply a "ruse" which wanted to reduce it to a fear of hell or damnation, no, but that's a deep subject which I can't get into here.
Nothing even quasi religious about it. Worship and faith, large parts of religion, are totally absent.
If you mean "rituals", fair enough.
As far as "faith", that's another term that often never gets consistently defined, but if you mean people having some axiomatic trust or affirmation towards it as an institution (which isn't coming from expertise, like a Newton or Einstein, but merely from trust in the institution or the popular figures), I would consider that faith, yes.
Likewise, regardless of what one's belief or philosophy is, I would argue that all beliefs and systems are based on some axiom(s) or "prime truth" held to be absolute, this is not attempting to compare and contrast different systems, which ones are 'better' or worse, and so on and so forth, just stating what is.
As far as truth itself, I believe that other than in pure mathematical theory, nothing can be "perfectly": defined,but realistically it could be defined "better or worse".
(Most people for example, would say without a doubt that a legal system which prohibits rape and murder is far better than one which allows it).
Some definitions are fixed by the context in which they are used. A scientist might have faith that a cure for cancer will be found, but that is not the context in which I used it.
So by "faith", It has to involve belief specifically in a "God"?
Belief in any other prime truth or axiom held to be absolute doesn't qualify?
Did you not read what I wrote?
I said that I used faith in a specific context in which it has a specific definition. The rest of the definitions of faith have their places and uses, but not in the context I used it.
My kids will believe that they can make it out of their predicament. They will have faith. The future looks bright because God takes care of us. That is why their plans will succeed. That is why it is worth struggling and fighting no matter how difficult things may become. Things will work out just fine. Do your part and God will take care of the rest.
Believers have the motivation to deal with setbacks. They know that they can do it, and that is why they can. Praise the Lord!
As an example, if you want to use a stereotypical "rabid Trump supporter" as an example, they may not literally believe Trump is a "God", however they may refuse to say anything negative about him whatsoever, and treat any criticism even if constructive as a 'personal attack' or insult.
(The same may be true of rabid 'supporters' of any person, cause, idea, but I'm using Trump as this example).
What the hell has this got to do with what I said? I have no idea what the connection is!
My kids will believe that they can make it out of their predicament. Because they will have an education
Quoting alcontali
The future looks bright because they know how to take care of themselves. That is why their plans will succeed.
Quoting alcontali
That is why it is worth struggling and fighting to get a good education no matter how difficult things may become. Things will work out just fine. Do your part and you will be capable of taking care whatever comes your way.
Why is your way of saying things better than mine? Why would anyone want to risk their well being on something that has no evidence of existence?
Can I choose any religion for me & my children?
Sorry mate, but for them to be happy you have to sign up with theirs. :cool:
@alcontali is a Muslim and I am a believer in Christ. We get along just fine.
I guess that the first red pill to take concerning "a good education" is Aaron Clarey's notorious book "Worthless".
But then again, even high school is a dangerous public-school indoctrination camp. Even if young men may (or may not) manage to find that elusive "well-paid job" after decades of indoctrination, these hereto feminized boys will still have to contend with the prospect of spending their lives as friend-zoned beta orbiters. It is incredible difficult to undo the usually fatherless boy's emasculation -- pretty much equivalent to a physical castration -- that takes place in the education system.
Rollo Tomassi's book The Rational Male is undoubtedly another red pill to take on the subject:
The school will simply castrate your boys.
The meta red pill is to understand that almost everything you believe is a manipulative and deceptive lie that does not serve your own interests but the ones of the corporate oligarchy.
Even the evil, anti-biological, crappy food -- worthless calories -- that you buy from Walmart is purposely designed to make you sick. Without expensive corporate health insurance you are not supposed to survive for too long the onslaught on your body of worthless processed food surreptitiously laced with sickening high-fructose corn syrup.
According to Rollo Tomassi, somehow still a Catholic, it is the Church that has become the worst scam of all:
Quoting Rollo Tomassi in 'Losing My Religion'
Quoting Sir2u
Islam has a tremendously red-pilling effect. It helps you understand that most messages flying around in modern society through school, mass media, church, workplace, and so on, are manipulative and deceptive lies.
The core red-pill message is:
All of society's institutions are now highly corrupt and try to manipulate you with their deceptive lies. If you don't fight back, you will simply start believing these lies and become very unhappy, if these dangerous lies do not kill end up killing you first.
Yes, certainly. It is your choice.
I would like to add: be careful with organized clergy. There is a major difference between asking advice to an independent religious scholar of your choice, who gives you an answer that entails from scripture, versus organized clergy who may manipulate you into adopting society's imperatives, especially, when that society is obviously corrupt. The corporate oligarchy controls pretty much all organized clergy nowadays.
One problem I'm having with this statement is that different religions make different claims about what happens to me after I die and there's no way that they can all be correct - at most only one religion is correct and all the others are wrong to some degree.
If I guess wrong and choose the wrong religion, then after I die? Really, really bad stuff will happen to me. Depending on which religion is actually the true correct religion my eternal soul will burn in hellfire for all eternity - OR - maybe I'll suffer in purgatory from some period of time - OR - maybe I'll be re-incarnated as a cockroach.
This is bad enough for me - but if my children choose the same religion (as is most typical) then the same terrible fate will befall them as well.
Though we could use getting together to serve a moral objective.
China built a hospital in a quick time recently.
We all can improve the habitat, quickly. So that's the use of grouping together.
Don't tell me I missed the apple?
And so my fellow philosophers: ask not, what your religion can do for you; ask what you can do for your religion!
LOL
There's grouping up for a moral cause, and then there's grouping up for some other regime.
What's beleiving in a God going to achieve?
We're more likely to make the numbers for a moral push? Then, that religion is temporary les' it become maleficent.
I suppose it could work, but it seems more like a costly, and pointless alternative to raw communication. "We need to group up and work together", "we're going to use religion - due to the amount of non intellectuals who can't reason with standard data, of course". "No we just need to group up and fix the habitat - don't worry bout' them".
The point I'm trying to make is that people can act in a "religious" or "fanatical" way about things even if they aren't traditionally what is defined or perceived as a "religion".
Sure, but I think it makes a big difference if the fanaticism is making an appeal to the supernatural. Its easier to justify the most extreme acts/beliefs when you can measure them against things beyond the natural world (eternal life in paradise, an eternity of suffering, seeing all your dead loved ones, satisfying the plans of a divine, perfect being etc.)
"Supernatural" is another term which gets used and abused.
If anything which isn't "natural" in the sense of matter / energy is "supernatural", then one could easily say that mathematics, thoughts, logic, ideas, etc are "supernatural".
Generally this term gets used to refer to "God" or a very clichéd or childish archetype of what a "God" or something similar is to begin with, usually something more akin to one of Carl Jung's archetypes than anything else.
In reality, I believe that such "childish" archetypes and people's perceptions of them exist in other instances, even one's not traditionally thought of as referring to the "supernatural".
I meant it in the sense of those things which exist outside the ability to detect or test or interact with science. Ghosts, magic, gods etc...the things that rationality, logic, reason, science etc cannot be used upon.
I think you're conflating different things, if by "science" you mean Francis Bacon's method based on "induction" or "empiricism", that's a completely separate institution or method from "deduction", aka logic / reason or "rationalism".
As far as "ghosts, magic, gods", unless someone attempts an actual definition, rather than just a very stereotyped 'image' or 'archetype' of one, I find that discussion rather points.
For the same reason I would find a discussion on aliens pointless, if a person's fictitious idea of an "alien" was a stereotyped cartoon image of "Marvin the Martian", rather than a real discussion about what actually makes an alien an alien to begin with.
I didnt intend to mash all those things together, but to identify each separately as things that cannot be used to detect/ interact with the supernatural. Basically, all the tools we have to figure things out.
I suspect that you may be seeing too much in that.
In other words, you would need to knowingly do some really bad things to be refused entry into Paradise. With some self-discipline, not even that much, it should be possible to avoid engaging in the absolutely worst behaviour.
It is similar to avoiding the death penalty on earth by not overly misbehaving. How many people end up on death row each year? Not that many either.
I am an atheist and I work in a catholic school. :gasp: I have friends that are mormons, jehovas witnesses, hindu, and even a witch. And I get along with everyone.
As I said, I don't give a shit about religion. As long as the person is nice and does not try to convince me they are right.
Does education mean only going to school? I am a teacher and even I know that most schools and universities are as useless a hell at preparing kids for their future. Education to me means being prepared for life, not going to school.
Quoting alcontali
Does this apply to religions as well? I guess it must because most religions are nothing more than money making corporations.
Quoting alcontali
I live in a backward, third world country, so this does not really apply too much yet.
Quoting alcontali
I agree, but that is about the religion, the church, not about the people. Just like every other religion there are good and bad people in it. As a muslim you should understand that the bad part of the religion is the one that out shines all of the good that exists in it.
Quoting alcontali
Why do I or my kids need a religion to tell me what are lies and what is truth?
Religious,
Concerned with sacred matters, religion or the church
Having or showing belief in and reverence for a deity
Of or relating to clergy bound by monastic vows
Extremely scrupulous and conscientious
Fanatical
Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea
Dingo already said the first part of my answer.
Trump supporters or other rabid follower of any group or person are nor generally counted as religious, fanatical and rabid yes, but not religious.
Death row and religion of any sort should not be mixed up like that.
But given the state of our planet, with overconsumption of resources especially our food, and we are limited in our abilities to manufacture it on our farms, combined with climate change, too many children is God's curse on us and he delights in our suffering!
I agree for organized clergy. They are as much under control of the corporate oligarchy as for example doctors. So, yes, beware of mouthpieces of the powers that be.
Quoting Sir2u
The scriptures are excellent foundations for a system of morality. This is certainly the case for Abrahamic religions. I was absolutely not criticizing Jewish (or Islamic) law when criticizing organized clergy. On the contrary, I consider any conclusion that syntactically entails from the scriptures to be legitimate.
Quoting Sir2u
Modern society is very much at odds with religion. It advocates behaviour that is contrary to religion. If modern society says one thing and religion says another on the morality of behaviour, then you can safely assume that religion is right while modern society is depraved, wrong, and even dangerous.
All institutions of modern society are now totally corrupt: public-school indoctrination camp, mass media, politics, medicine, organized clergy, workplaces, corporations, and so on. They all advocate horrible depravities. They cannot be trusted in any way.
In my opinion, concerning morality, all other sources besides religious scriptures are entirely corrupt and depraved. So, yes, amidst this cesspool of corruption, you need the scriptures as a reminder about the truth on morality.
If you do not want children, then in that case, do not make any. That's your own choice, isn't it? Furthermore, I also believe that people who do not want children, should not make any.
For believers, unlike for unbelievers, it is a bit different, because God wants us to make children. So, that is why we want to make children. Furthermore, I also believe that people who want to have children, should simply make them; and that is obviously what the believers are doing.
I think that this schema clearly explains what is going on. Problem solved.
I have many questions each of which will open up different avenues of discussion. Let me start here:
If I follow you, anyone can get into Paradise - Christian, Jew, Atheist, etc - as long as they behave decently and avoid major sins. Correct?
Quoting www.alislam.org, Library / Frequently Asked Questions
Quoting Habib al-Jifri, Some non-Muslims may still enter Paradise
Quoting islam.stackexchange.com
Quoting www.interfaith.org
To cut a long story short, it is presumptuous to predict what will happen on the Day of the Last Judgment. We will all have sinned, regardless of our choice of religion. Some of us will be allowed into Paradise and others will not. It is silly to believe that religious affiliation on earth will be the only thing that will matter on That Day. Absolutely nobody seems to believe that.
I think the Unitarian Universalist church is a good example of how relatively non-theistic religion can and should work. I'm an atheist, but I think atheism's greatest mistake is that it took away something so fundamemtal to so many people's lives and offered nothing substantial to replace it with.
A few things a UU style church offers:
It gives people a sense of community, which is not something I personally feel a need for very often, but it's important to recognize that most people do need that in their lives.
It gives them a sense of belonging. Not just to a community, but a cause. Atheists need to find meaning in a meaningless universe, so sometimes it helps to have an institution to represent all that.
A safe place to hear and discuss life and ethics and all that. Otherwise all the messages around us tend to be Coca Cola ads and pop culture. People's brains slowly disintegrate.
Quoting islam.stackexchange.com
You seem to be contradicting yourself.
A common refrain, that atheism leads to nihilism or whatever but how true is this? I don’t believe there’s any evidence that atheists are less moral or ignorant than the religious, in fact the opposite may be the case. Also, the religious are far from immune to rampant consumerism, greed, and manipulation by the rich and powerful.
I wasn't talking about morality. I was talking about filling your life with meaningful content.
Quoting islam.stackexchange.com
According to the scholar, the verse is context-specific.
But the holy brothers keep on getting the holy sisters pregnant, because that is what a god said they should does. Most of the atheist I know don't have more than one or two kids, how many catholic families can you say that about. Most other religions still believe it is the place of the woman to stay at home raising they kids. Luckily the women seem to be getting smarter and are refusing to accept this status in life.
So it would appear, but she sure has balls.
I doubt that any society advocates bad behavior, they do permit it though.
Quoting alcontali
So the church when the church says that you cannot use birth control because it is not beneficial for mankind and therefore incorrect behavior I should believe them?
So the church when the church says that you cannot have sex outside of marriage(even though they do) because it is not beneficial for mankind and therefore incorrect behavior I should believe them?
So the church when the church says that you cannot separate from your spouse that is beating you because it is not beneficial for mankind and therefore incorrect behavior I should believe them?
Don't think so.
Quoting alcontali
Does the "and so on" include churches and religions? Don't answer, it was a rhetorical question.
Do you seriously think that this is a problem that has just popped up in the last few years? The only difference between today and 2 thousand years ago is the technology that helps to spread the ideas.
Quoting alcontali
Could you give us some examples of this? I still cannot get my head around this advocating depravities thing. I have not heard anything about the college of medicine in any country advocating any depravities. But maybe we different definitions of depravities.
Quoting alcontali
But if the leaders of the religions do not practice what they preach, why should anyone follow their lead.
I have never needed to find a meaning to life, because I have always known it.
People tend to over dramatize such things and insist that humans are different from other animals and therefore must have a purpose for living, all the while overlooking the obvious.
The only purpose in life is to live it to its fullest. To get as much as possible out of it while you can.
go places, meet people, eat different food and drink new wines, learn as much as you can about as many things as you can.
To sum it up, experience as many things as is possible and try to be happy while making as many others happy as is possible. I have no intentions of waiting for the next life to start enjoying myself when i can do it perfectly well here and now.
And, you know, I agree with that. That's how I live my own life.
But I've come to realize over the years that this is possibly just a psychological trait people like you and I happened to be born with. Other people might have to to a lot of self-work to get to that place.
I've come to realize that there are lots of people, however, who somehow don't have that. It's just not how their brains are wired. They cannot find meaning inside and through themselves and need some external force to supply them with one. In fact, I think that's probably true of the majority of people in one way or another.
It's why you can have on one hand people with all sorts of problems and issues pull off amazing feats overcoming their circumstances, and then other really objectively fortunate people just fall into despair and throw their lives away. There's some kind of internal drive that some people have and others lack that makes the difference.
For those people, I think there needs to be something, somewhere they can turn to.
There are too many people whose lives clearly lack independent, internal meaning for that to be a major misconception.
Quoting Artemis
I think that the problem is more of a growing up thing than a hardwired problem. When I grew up we were told that you have to be responsible for yourself, that you have to learn and do whatever is needed to be able to get ahead in life. And we were taught that we do not get ahead by stepping on others to do so.
More and more parents are abdicating their duties and letting the internet and forcing the teachers to do the up-bring of their kids. Who knows what tomorrows kids will be like or how they are going to survive.
Personally I think that people today are being trained to be useless so that big brother can take over.
OK - so a person can live an exemplary life as a non-believer and get into Paradise. But if you accept the faith but then later in life choose another religion, then you are denied Paradise even if you have otherwise lived an exemplary life. Correct?
BTW - it's not necessary to cite any verses. I have no reason to doubt your honesty or accuracy.
I’m not sure how to interpret this. You could be talking about religious or non-religious people. Also, meaning, of the sort we’re discussing, is necessarily interdependent or dependent on others and our culture.
For example, North American society advocates taking out interest-carrying student loans. In Islamic morality, that amounts to encouraging bad behaviour.
Quoting Sir2u
Quoting Wikipedia on birth control in Islam
Quoting Sir2u
The term "marriage" in Islam refers to a contractual arrangement with the terms and conditions as specified in Islamic law. Signing up to T&C that are materially different from the ones specified by Islamic law can rarely be justified. The believer would need very, very good reasons to do that. For the believer, sex can only take place within the framework of legitimacy specified by Islamic law.
Quoting Sir2u
There is no Church in Islam. Advice on matters of morality is best obtained from independent religious scholars ("mufti") in written form. It is perfectly ok and even recommended to go "mufti shopping" and compare advice from different scholars prior to reaching a conclusion on a jurisprudential matter.
Possibly. I am not a religious scholar, though. It is better to ask such jurisprudential question to one or more independent scholars ("mufti") and to compare their answers ("mufti shopping").
The role of an imam, who leads the congregation in worship at a mosque, is very public and very visible, and therefore often under quite a bit of political pressure. He can often not speak freely without risking reprisals from secular authorities. Therefore, it is preferable not to burden an imam at the mosque with jurisprudential questions but to direct such questions to independent scholars ("mufti"), who are much less visible, and who can syntactically derive written advisories from scripture much more freely.
Nurture is a factor, but probably not as great of one as people like to think. Twin studies have shown that even adopted into different families, people with the exact same genes have similar life outcomes and life satisfaction rates:
Twin studies link
Well.... Then even atheists would need a culture that has things which fulfill those needs in a productive way.
Before going on in this discussion I should be clear - I have no religious beliefs and as such do not belief in any afterlife. That said, I am good friends with people of differing religions and I see first hand that it provides a source of comfort to them. I have no problem with people being religious as long as they do not try to impose their beliefs on me. If a person's religion provides them with meaning and structure to their lives, then who am I to tell them differently?
So getting back to my first question. Put yourself in the position of a person who feels the need to belong to a religion but is not sure about which religion to join. Each religion says different things about the nature of the afterlife and how you should behave in this life. Some religions say that as long as you are a good decent person you will get into paradise. Other religions - e.g. some fundamentalist Christian denominations - say that if you do not believe properly you will burn in hellfire for all eternity.
So how is a person to choose one out of this bewildering variety of options? Remember, only one can be completely correct - and if you choose wrong you could burn in hell for all eternity. That's a pretty serious penalty for guessing wrong.
By choosing a religion, you are choosing a system of rules that specifies what behaviour is right and wrong. My own, main concern is the same as for any system of rules, i.e. Is such system actually a functioning formal system?
Then the question becomes: How do you know that a system of rules is a legitimate formal system? Answer: Are theorems/conclusions in such system (conceivably) mechanically verifiable? If yes, then it is a legitimate formal system. If no, then it is not.
One reason why a system is not a formal system, is because not all its rules have been documented. Then the question becomes: why not? What is it that these people can say but that they cannot write?
Quoting Catholic Encyclopedia on Living magisterium
I completely distrust such "living organ" that is apparently supposed to know secret, undocumented truths, i.e. "Divine instructions which they transmitted to the Church and which were not committed to the inspired writings", which prevent the system of rules from being a formal system.
I also totally distrust people who claim that they can only transmit information by improvising it in face to face contacts. That approach sounds too much like "I cannot give you the price for that product over the phone. Please, come to the shop." Seriously, what exactly is it that they can verbally say but that they cannot write? Their refusal to commit to something that is etched in stone, and their desire to invent information on the fly, are despicable to me. I despise that kind of people. They are born liars. I view that kind of people with utter contempt only.
Someone who reserves for himself the right to lie, is obviously going to lie.
Still, imagine that they are right? Imagine that they know a secret that is relevant? What kind of secret would that be? Well, in that case, they know that there are lies in the information that they have made publicly available. Without the knowledge of what exactly is true and what exactly is false in what they have published as scriptures, you will be led astray. The exchange between Martin Luther and the emissary of the Pope at his trial is telling in that regard:
[i]Martin Luther: If you can show me through scripture and reason that I would be wrong, I will retract what I have written.
Papacy: But dear Martin, the Bible itself is the arsenal whence each heresiarch has drawn his deceptive arguments.[/i]
In fact, the emissary of the Pope could be right, and only he knows why. If you do not know the full truth about the Bible -- which you cannot because that is exactly their secret -- any argument through scripture and reason will still be fundamentally wrong.
As far as I am concerned, I am out of there. That is my own conclusion.
Quoting EricH
That is one of the many reasons mentioned in the opinions, mentioned in my previous post, why you are not going to burn in hell merely for guessing it wrong.
In what way is it counted as bad behavior? I don't see the bad part of getting an education by paying for it. In the islamic countries, do they pay for the people to get the education they want or do the people that have no money nor loans lose out on education?
Quoting Wikipedia on birth control in Islam
The other religions are good at adapting, twisting or corrupting the holy words to suit their benefits. Does it not seem contradictory that these people are saying that children are the gifts of the god, but you are allowed to be impolite and reject the gift.
Quoting alcontali
So why are there so many cases of sex out of wedlock. If, as you said, looking after the body is of prime importance to islam, how could something as basic as sex be considered bad?
The same question applies here as with the other gods, if he is so great why cannot he fix the causes of the problems so that they do not happen. If he made women and they are dis-obedient, why did he just make them as servants that have no other use from the beginning.
Quoting alcontali
Lots of other people do that as well, shop around until they find a church, priest, pastor that suits their taste. But this also begs the same question as for the other religions; if the priest, pastor and mufti are all guided by allah or god, how could they possible give different advise?
And the whole world has seem how the people are treated by these people, people being beaten, flogged, and stoned to death.
Yes the twin studies are fascinating I have read quite a few over the years. But is it really possible for a person to be genetically programmed to wear the same sweaters, have the same type of dog, marry a person with the same name or looks? There are lots of examples of twins being so alike even after being brought up in different countries, but no real explanation of why.
One of the articles I read years ago looked at the tastes in food of the twins. It was found that those that lived in different parts of the world from each other often had favorite dishes that while not containing the same ingredients the chemical content was very similar in a lot of the cases. They came to the conclusion that there was a strong possibility that the bodies being Identical had the same needs and that was probably the reason why they like the same food. The report mentioned a case were two older brothers went to visit each other and found a new favorite food, that of their brother. I never looked for the second part of that report, after they had done the experiments and research they had planned, it should be interesting.
Gum health is easier to understand, identical bodies would have the same resistance or propensity to germs and viruses.
Happiness and well being are not that easy. It seems silly to think of people having or not having happiness genes, or more or less of them. It would make more sense to say that because they are healthier, they live a happier life. But life is not just about health is it? Would it be possible to have a gene that makes you less worried about everyday problems such as bills and work? Or do you just learn to live with it. :chin:
Quoting alcontali
So the imans are mouthpieces of the powers that be? He can only say what the government lets him.
It's not self-evident to you?
Your brain structure is determined by your genes, your brain structure determines your personality, your personality is the key to everything that is in your power to find happiness.
No.
Quoting Artemis
I am a teacher, and have had the luck to have taught seven different pairs of identical twins and several fraternal twins that have never been separated. Only one of the sets had similar, not identical personalities. How do you explain that?
If you knew anything about brain structure you would know that it changes during your life. The changes are based on many things that happen to you, your diet and the amount of exercise you do can influence the development of the brain. So no, it is not all genetic. If that were so then they would always look identical as well.
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/bioscience/10-things-that-change-your-brain/
I explain that by it not being a controlled study and just your observational anecdote.
Quoting Sir2u
Leave the snark.
Quoting Sir2u
As I've repeatedly said, nurture is a factor. It's just not as great of one as you seem to assume.
That is context dependent. It certainly happens.
By leading a congregation of believers in prayer, the imam is simply too visible and too much of a public figure. That is why you could get him into serious trouble by asking him to honestly answer sensitive questions. In fact, many will simply try to avoid giving an answer. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of ulema (=scholars) are not public figures. They are not an easy target for intimidation attempts and therefore it is much easier for them to say what they want.
This discussion is going in many different directions simultaneously. That's not a criticism at all - you are giving some fascinating historical details. So I'm going to first address two of the items that I consider secondary to the main line of (what I consider to be) the central topic of this discussion.
Catholic Church is Somehow Hiding the Rules
I have been good friends with Catholics both growing up and as an adult - and that is not my perception. As far as I can tell, there are no secret rules for Catholics. For centuries they were not supposed to eat meat on Friday. Then, in 1966 the rules changed - but they were publicly announced by National Conference of Catholic Bishops (I'm over-simplifying this for brevity) . Now it may be that the process of deciding the rules was hidden, but to the best of my knowledge no practicing Catholic has ever been punished or criticized for violating a hidden rule.
Quoting alcontali
We seem to be looping around in this particular thread of the discussion. Even tho I have zero belief in an afterlife, it pleases me to hear religious people say this. It tells me that I am dealing with a reasonable person - albeit one who has some beliefs that I find very strange :smile: But I'll try one more time. IF the statement I quoted above is correct then I should have a very pleasant afterlife.
But "IF" The Southern Baptists of from the southern part of the USA are correct, then both of us will spend a long time suffering together. If anything, they would likely rate this as a very suitable punishment for our sins. . . .
Quoting alcontali
This is one of the reasons I responded to you in the first place. Religions are far more that simply a system of rules. Our legal system - while not perfect - provides an excellent road map on how to live a good decent life. If I obey the laws of the USA & my state & municipality, I'm pretty much there.
I wish I were a more eloquent person - I'm sure there are better ways of expressing this next thought:
There are "features" unique to each religion which drives their particular set of rules - and there are major areas on the metaphorical Venn Diagram of the set of all features of all religions where there is no overlap between 2 or more religions. This lack of overlap is the source of a significant portion of conflict in our world today.
BTW - I admire your knowledge of math theory, I wish I could understand it at your level. Please treat this as a metaphor. :smile:
The problem is what the Catholic encyclopedia says on the living magisterium:
Quoting Catholic Encyclopedia on the Living Magisterium
So, if I understand it right, the Church has access to "Divine instructions which they transmitted to the Church and which were not committed to the inspired writings" without which the Biblical scripture is not complete and without which it cannot be interpreted correctly.
Based on these orally-transmitted secrets, only the Church can teach doctrine:
Quoting Catholic Encyclopedia on why the Living Magisterium is needed
The Bible cannot be treated as the axiomatic foundation of a formal system for morality because the Church has important and very relevant secrets that it withholds from the public and on which it bases its power to direct the morality of its members.
Quoting EricH
This view turns you into a slave of the corporate oligarchy:
Quoting Wikipedia on regulatory capture
Secular law is never meant to bring justice. It only exists to justify injustices. In secular law, there is always someone in the corporate oligarchy who benefits to the detriment of others. If you hand over control over your morality to the corporate oligarchy, the oligarchs will keep using you, until you will be used up, and then they will unceremoniously get rid of you. You may be loyal to the corporate oligarchs by keeping the laws that they invent, but the corporate oligarchs are not loyal to you. The corporate oligarchs are loyal only to themselves.
The entire economy around you is filled with accomplices of the corporate oligarchs who use deception, manipulation, and outright lies to deprave you. In their control, secular law is just a tool to hijack your money and especially your soul. It is truly a Faustian pact. If you turn yourself into the instrument of the devil by keeping his law, you are inevitably doomed.
Other than that it sounds like you've been reading Chomsky. Much of what you say about corporate control of the legal system is - if not totally accurate - then at least in the right ballpark. The problem is that if you are living in the USA? Unless you are living off the grid on a commune somewhere, you are inside the system. You have no choice in the matter. Each of us has to figure out how (s)he can best live inside this system and still be a good, decent person. It isn't that hard - at least in principal.
I could be wrong (it happens on a regular basis) but I believe that - according to the rules you follow - my conduct towards my fellow human beings permits me to enter your Paradise.
Meanwhile, I don't feel like you have addressed my major point. Here's what you said:
Quoting alcontali
And here's my response - I've bold-faced the key points:Quoting EricH
Reasonable, but spending 5 years teaching them gave me a lot of insight. I probably knew them better than any of the researchers knew their subjects.
Quoting Artemis
Not being snarky, that is your perception of what I said.
Quoting Artemis
So you have read a few articles that say something like that and you are suddenly an expert. Tell me sir, what are your personal qualifications in the area of genetics? How many years have you been studying the topic.
And where exactly did I state how much of a factor I think nurture is?
Is this what the perfect society looks like?
The god of these people lets their servants, the rulers of their nations, be tyrants over their brother believers. Sounds just like the other religions to me.
That's Ma'am2U, thank you very much.
Seems to me odd to insist your five years of observing a couple of twins are worth more in information than the research I've presented. Seems more like you just don't like the results because they don't jive with your position.
Critique the argument as is, or don't. But don't start these juvenile snarks about my qualifications or expertise. That's not just bad philosophy, it's bad interpersonal skills.
I very libertarian myself. If you think away Islam, you may even think that I am libertarian. However, Islam encapsulates and constrains my libertarianism.
In my belief strategy, I need to fit concepts, foreign or new to Islam, into the Islamic framework, simply because I reject system-less thinking. Either one thinks within a system, or else one is thinking about a system, because in all other cases, one is simply doing system-less bullshit.
Why?
Even core (propositional) logic itself is a formal system with 14 axioms. Therefore, you can never start from an empty page. There is a lot already written in that page, and now you have to fit into that existing legacy, whatever you want to deal with. This does not mean that there is just one formal system of logic. David Hilbert did some really nice work in that regard with his Hilbert calculi. Therefore, even questioning logic and proposing alternative formal systems of logic is possible. However, you will need to keep in mind that there will be two systems: the metalogic system and the object logic system. Your metatheoretical results will then be expressed in your choice of metalogic about your choice of object logic.
When reasoning from first principles there are no blank slates. Empty deductive systems simply do not exist. Model-theoretically, empty deductive systems simply have no legitimate model.
Still, libertarianism is a concern, and according to me, a very legitimate one. Libertarianism is, however, not a legitimate formal system. Therefore, I am willing to address its concerns but only within the framework of a legitimate formal system.
According to Islam, anarchy, i.e. ruler-lessness, is not permitted. If you want a practical example of what anarchy means, just look at the situation in Libya: two thousand militia combating each other and vying for power. Unlike what some people seem to believer, anarchy does not even mean that we will have no ruler. It always means that we will have (lots of) wannabe rulers fighting with each other over who will be the only ruler.
Therefore my libertarian-like strategy consists of accepting a ruler. I will, however, not hesitate to implement counter-veiling measures to rein in his power. Islam is in itself already one such powerful counter-veiling strategy: the ruler cannot invent the laws because Allah has invented all the laws already. A second important and relatively modern strategy consists in preventing the ruler from issuing the currency by promoting the use of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. There are obviously many more counter-veiling measures possible to rein in the ruler's power. Unless strictly forbidden by Islam, I will not hesitate to use all of them.
My apologizes madame. Not everyone here uses there real gender in their name and avatar.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jun/02/twins-identical-genes-different-health-study
The study you provided a link to was about separated at birth identical twins. Here is one about identical twins that grew up together and have very different personalities. Which according to your "It's not self-evident to you theory" should be impossible. Here is a relevant quote from it.
I usually make it a habit to try and read various points of view, hence my "but no real explanation of why" comment.
Quoting Artemis
That seems to imply that there is a double standard of some sort operating in your thinking process. You are allowed to mock my qualifications, but I am not allowed to even ask about yours. Why is that?
Quoting Artemis
Practice what you preach.
I have literally lifted and distilled from their own publications the desire of the Holy Apostolic Church to control our morality by using occult secrets.
It is also exactly what they told Martin Luther at his trial in Worms, Germany, in April 1521, in front of emperor Charles V, then ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. The emissary of the Church rebuked Luther's defence "through scripture and reason" by invoking the necessity to be in the known of their occult secrets in order to navigate around and avoid dangerous landmines in the Bible: "The Bible itself is the arsenal whence each evil heresiarch has drawn his deceptive arguments."
Therefore, I will be forgiven if I refuse to use the Bible as the foundation for a formal system of morality. It is the accredited publisher himself, the Holy Apostolic Church, which strictly forbids such usage of their "copyrighted" work. Anybody who tries to do that anyway, is acting in violation of the intellectual property of the successors of Saint Peter. That is why I do not endorse the Protestant view either.
Martin Luther may have been epistemically entirely right, but his behaviour was still in violation of the intellectual property of the Church. Furthermore, to anybody not in possession of the occult secrets, the editor and publisher of the aforementioned intellectual property does not even allow the use of their publication as first principles for the purpose of syntactically deriving doctrine.
So, no, I am not interested in violating the Church's intellectual property by abusing it for unlicensed purposes.
Quoting EricH
Yes, agreed.
Religion also proclaims the transcendental origin of this system of rules, necessarily from outside its formal system of rules.
A formal system is not in a position to justify its own construction logic. That is why first principles are what they are. In that sense, the origin of the formal system of religious law is proclaimed in natural language, outside of any formalism.
This is actually a generality.
From some meta-level on, we abandon the lower-level formalisms that govern the system and start reasoning about the system in natural language. The core of epistemology and the core of ontology are themselves simply not formal systems.
In Islam, the idea is that we proclaim our religiosity on grounds of our fitrah, i.e. our natural predisposition.
And if the people are not naturally predisposed they beat the hell out of them until they are.
How can a human being be naturally predisposed to be wrapped up in a hot bag in a place known for its high temperatures? How can a human being be naturally predisposed to be sub-servant to another just because of their gender. How can human beings be naturally predisposed to never want an education. How can a human being be naturally predisposed to be poor all of their lives.
Has anyone asked the people what they want? Of course not, because they know that some people that are not scared of being beaten for disobedience will tell the truth. The rest will say what they are supposed to because of the fear of the powers that be. And no really believes that it is the politicians forcing the religion to do these, it is the religions that rule the governments.
When did I ever mock your qualifications???
Quoting Sir2u
The self-evident part was in reference to the mechanism twin studies are supposed to to suggest similarities arise. It seemed/still seems odd to me that you wouldn't realize the mechanism is genetic makeup.
Quoting Sir2u
The article you quote doesn't really contradict my position. It just suggests that nurture is also a factor (remember that under "nurture" falls all environmental influences an individual encounters).
Consider this part of the article:
""In the case of osteoporosis, which we once thought was caused by a single mutant gene, we now believe that there may be 500 genes involved – interacting to trigger the disease in people at different ages," says Spector."
500 genes influence osteoporosis alone. That's 500 points that may or may not be environmentally triggered to some extent or another. And yet, no environment can trigger that for which there is no gene.
Quoting Artemis
Quoting Sir2u
Quoting Artemis
Apart from your name, "Artemis", exactly what contact have you had with twins? That is why I asked if you have any professional qualifications. It seems odd to me that some should be so insistent that they are right without being able to do more that point to an article(that has lots of counter opinions) as qualification of their point of view.
Quoting Artemis
Just because something is "supposed to " do something does not make it "self-evident" that it actually does.
Quoting Artemis
I have never contradicted your point of view either, all I said was that I was not sure how much of one or the other actually makes you what you are. The article I linked explained quite clearly that the difference between the twins were likely caused by difference in the environment causing changed to the DNA. Which would mean that while genetics plays a big part, genetics is affected by the environments in which the people live.
Quoting Artemis
Quoting Artemis
First you say that genes are the principal controller of behavior but you think that they might need guidance when their behavior changes. Are there not genes that make people predisposed to those changes? Or are the changes caused by environment overriding the genes? So would joining a church group be make it possible to change what is genetic?
Science still does not know it all, so how can you say that it is obvious?
I have picked just one of your simplistic and alarming phrases.
Maybe we should first discuss something like Aaron Clarey's book, "Worthless":
Quoting Amazon's description of 'Worthless'
You may have been manipulated by the corporate oligarchy into believing in fairy tales; more specifically, by the fiat bankstering cartel that writes out the student loans, and also by the academic profiteering industry that charges gigantic amounts of cash for a very dumb exercise in useless credentialism which will only lead to a part-time job of slinging coffees at Starbucks.
Welcome to the student loan crisis, i.e. an impressive den of false, pagan beliefs. If you do not believe that these pagans believe the lies, then let me confirm with you that they do believe them.
So, yes, these people are several orders of magnitude more stupid and more gullible than anything you could have imagined.
Someone with a worthless degree is not just an idiot. That person is even a certifiable and certified idiot, and has his/her worthless degree, along with the balance statement on outstanding student loan debt, to prove that very fact. Look. There it is: The official certificates of stupidity testifying to the retardedness of their holder, the king or queen of idiots.
Contact with twins? Are you suggesting we rely on arguments from anecdote now?
Once and for all, stick to any objectively verifiable data you can present and argue with me on those same grounds. I'm not going to discuss my own person with you. Take it or leave it.
Quoting Sir2u
Yes. I've said that pretty much from the start.
Quoting Sir2u
I never suggested churches change genetics. I said church and other cultural mechanisms which help give external meaning to people's lives fill a gap when the genetics for self-fulfillment are lacking in some way or another. Think of it as akin to insulin for T1D patients.
I was going to continue along the main line of this discussion, bu your take on this is fascinating - I've never heard this line of reasoning before. I know there's no chance of dissuading you, but let me point out a few problems with this position. I hope you will at least consider them before rejecting them.
Copyright Illegally Obtained.
There was no notion of copyright back then, the Gospels were in the public domain. Peter had no authority to claim them - basically he took them by force.
Copyright Is Long Since Expired.
I think this speaks for itself.
Copyright Only Applies to New Testament
Even if we accept the notion that the Roman Catholic Church somehow "owns" the bible, it is clear that such ownership only applies to the New Testament. If anyone owns the Old Testament it's the Jews - and to the best of my knowledge they never transferred ownership over to the Roman Catholic Church.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Quoting alcontali
Now back to the main line of this thread. I am on your side with this one but for very different reasons. I will not use any religious text as the foundation for a system of morality, since - as you eloquently put it Quoting alcontali
Now we only know each other through our writings, so I hope this does not come across as critical - I'm going to ask you to do something that may be hard for you. I would like you to put yourself in the position of a person who has no religion - but is sincerely trying to evaluate them as objectively as possible. . .
There are countless religions on this planet - new ones keep popping into existence as we speak. They all claim to have transcendental origins - but they all make differing claims. Even if you accept the possibility of a transcendent origin there is no way to evaluate the correctness of such claims. And on top of that - each religion has it's own system of moral rules and these rules differ wildly among religions. Things which are permitted in one religion are forbidden in another. And on top of that, many (not all) religions have a long and well documented history of trying to force their beliefs on other people under penalty of death.
Now if the leaders of all the religions of the world could get together and come up with a set of rules of morality that they could agree upon? I would give this serious consideration. But until that time, I reject religion as a source of morality.
So the obvious next question is how can we construct a system of morality in the absence of transcendental authority. I confess - I do not have a definitive answer to this question. The best I can say is that It is up to us frail, flawed human beings to muddle through - to continue to talk to each other and try to figure out a path.
I would add (and yes, this likely sounds like a random thought coming out of nowhere) it is vitally important that we can laugh at ourselves.
No, I am asking you to clarify why you think that you are right and that I am wrong just because of one article that you read. On what do you base your certainty? The article was not even a scientific report, but one of many news articles that contain parts of a report. And there are other reports that show that environment does make quite a bit of difference.
Quoting Artemis
So let's look at all of the object verifiable data then. I think that if you read more you will find that science does not have enough verifiable data to be able to say exactly why people are like they are. If they did there would be lots of things in the news about it, the biggest discovery of the century type of stuff.
I don't want to discuss your person with you, I just would like to know if you are qualified to state what your are stating. Which is quite apparent you are not as the only thing that I can imagine about you is that you have some sort of infatuation about twins. How is Apollo by the way?
So if you do not want to explain how you are able to assert the "facts" you give I have no reason to believe you, I would like to see the evidence about your knowledge. Take it or leave it.
I have repeatedly told you I'm not interested in that tone or vein of interaction. Please excuse me, but I have better things to do with my life than let a perfect stranger be rude to me.
Buh-bye.
In fact, I have just translated their position at Martin Luther's trial into more modern terminology, in conjunction with Church's position in the article on the living magisterium, more specifically, Divine traditions not contained in Holy Scripture. There is clearly no way to use that as the foundation for a formal system of morality. Martin Luther would have loved it, but unfortunately, our beloved Augustinian friar was excommunicated in Decet Romanum Pontificem:
Quoting Decet Romanum Pontificem, excerpt
Actually, there wasn't only the "intellectual property" issue at stake in Luther's trial. He was also a staff member on the payroll of a Catholic institution of higher learning, and was apparently also facing accusations of insubordination and possibly violations of his non-compete clause.
Quoting EricH
Yes, but the Papal authorities of the Holy See also insist that they can successfully enforce their intellectual property by means of their trade secrets. Without the secret key, you cannot derive meaningful conclusions from the text.
Quoting EricH
Well, the origin of the axioms that form the construction logic of any formal system is always a non-issue and a non-problem. Where do the axioms of logic come from? Where the ones of number theory or set theory?
The only rule about that is that we are not allowed to justify the first principles of a formal system from within the formal system. As I mentioned before, the formal system of religious law does not mention any justification for its own axioms, because that is something mentioned in natural language outside the system. Problem solved.
Quoting EricH
That sounds too much like an attempt to do design by committee.
Quoting Wikipedia on 'design by committee'
Successful formal systems are built by benevolent dictators for life. For example, Linus Torvalds is the mafia boss of the linux kernel. He is the final autocrator and he does not debate his decisions. He just imposes them. Seriously, that is why it works. If you don't like Linus, because you think that he is an incompetent arsehole, you can always use or join another competing project, such as FreeBSD. So, the problem is solved by letting the alternatives compete with each other, and not by merging them. That is exactly the existing situation with competing religions. Hence, there is no problem and also no need to solve it.
Quoting EricH
Well, not really. You may be exaggerating that problem. Religions all have the same function and therefore are more similar than different. It's like with competing brands of cars. No matter who builds the car, it still has to do approximately the same things as any other car. So, the similarities will always be more striking than the differences.
Quoting EricH
Well, yeah, that brings us back to the fundamental problem of the atheists: they do not propose any alternative system for morality, and certainly not a formalizable one. Apparently, they must somehow lack "inspiration".
I would just want to fire up the Coq proof assistant and encode the axioms of the formal system for morality with a view on achieving mechanical verifiability from scripture of religious advisories.
If I have to wait for the atheists to come up with a proposal, I can simply forget about the project, because that amounts to waiting for Godot.
At the same time, the Islamic system of religious law is clearly the closest to formalization. Hence, in terms of "time to market" considerations, it is trivially obvious what to choose. If you want to defeat the competition with a sizable first-mover advantage, Islam is clearly the way to go. Only Jewish law could possibly catch up, but only if Rabbinic competition quickly decide to hit the ground running with their competing project, because otherwise, they can also forget about it. Nice guys always finish last!
You can pick all of the phrases you want, but answer the question I asked. So far you have not answered a single question of mine, you always sidestep them.
I have no interest in what the corporate, religious or even ethnic teachings and preachings are trying to do to the masses.
I asked about the predisposition of people against getting an education, are they or are they not predisposed to avoid getting an education. And to make sure it is clear what I am asking let us define education as any form of gaining knowledge.
If people are not predisposed towards avoiding an education, why should they not be asked to pay for it?
I am not interested in how they pay for it, that is their personal choice. If they are willing to accept a loan and get a worthless degree because they are too lazy to do the math beforehand or to find something better, that is their problem.
Comparing government loans to loan sharks might be correct, but no one forces anyone to take the money. They are free to do as many of us did and get a job to pay for their education. I worked for several years in the municipal garbage collection department to pay for mine.
How many islamic countries have free educational systems for their inhabitants?
Quoting alcontali
Maybe I would discuss it with you if you have read it, but because you posted an Amazon review instead of your own thoughts on the book I doubt that you have much to say. I read the book several years ago and was not all that impressed with it. "The curse of a high IQ" was better.
Quoting alcontali
I agree, there are a lot of people with useless degrees out there and no job. But who's fault is it? As you say, they were stupid enough to fall for the lies.
OK, so how many companies can you name that are hiring personnel in management and upward level jobs that are not asking for college degrees? Note that I am not asking for the jobs and companies that people invent for themselves, but for the jobs that people look for to pay their bills, buy a house, improve their level of living, and maybe have a health/retirement fund attached to it.
I almost forgot to mention this, here is the website of the author you mentioned.
http://assholeconsulting.com/bio/
Very convincing isn't it. :chin: :worry:
Edit: Sorry EricH this was sent as a reply to the wrong person.
I only addressed the question of education. It is not hard to become a worthless idiot of whom the stupidity is certified by a worthless degree along with spectacular student-loan debt. So, the question of education is not necessarily simple. Should children spend their childhood in public-school indoctrination camp and then acquire a worthless degree in a dumb liberal-art subject? Maybe or maybe not. That is certainly debatable. I do not send my children to public-school indoctrination camp. I do not believe that they could ever benefit from that. When I look at that kind of large-scale imbecilization factories, I even wonder why they exist in the first place?
Quoting Sir2u
But what exactly is knowledge? Do we even agree on that matter? Memorizing phone books replete with trivia does not amount to acquiring knowledge. On the contrary, that is utmost worthless. Furthermore, not even one of the culturally-Marxist beliefs that children learn in public-school indoctrination camps can be considered justified in epistemological terms. Again, all of that is worthless, and often even dangerous.
So, what the indoctrination camps teach, is usually not even knowledge. Still, even when the subject matter really is knowledge, I still do not support the practice of memorizing such knowledge databases. As far as I am concerned, either you use the machine, or else you build the machine, because in all other cases, it is you the machine.
Quoting Sir2u
I pay for the education of my children, but under my terms.
I do not want freebies. I do not want "free" education. It only means that you have no say over what the school will be doing. Just like I do not want a state department for providing shoes to the populace, I do not want one for education either. So, of course, I pay, if only, because that is how it is me who gets to decide what exactly I buy. Most services that masquerade as education are not only worthless but also ideological mouthpieces for cultural Marxism. The core ideology in my house is Islam and not cultural Marxism.
Quoting Sir2u
I am completely opposed to freebies. As I have said already, I do not want a ministry for the provision of gratis clothes to the populace. For a long list of reasons, too long to enumerate here, clothing should not be free of charge. The same is true for education and healthcare. I simply do not share that kind of culturally Marxist beliefs.
Quoting Sir2u
It is Allah's punishment for adopting false, pagan beliefs. If these people refuse to accept the truth, then they will still have to accept all consequences of doing so. Unfortunately, it is the very same people who engage in irresponsible behaviour who will later on demand that other, more responsible people bail them out. I can almost guarantee that these born idiots will not even pay off their student loans. They will again want freebies instead. I utterly despise these irresponsible freebie retards.
You see, their views are totally contrary to mine. As a man, I do not just pay for myself. I also pay for wife, children, subsidies and allowances to extended family, and charity to neighbours in the wider community. I cannot imagine seeking to ask for freebies from other men. The idea alone is horrifying to me. Other men don't owe me anything. I simply do not want to live in a country with that kind of freebie mentality.
Well, consider yourself blessed that you weren’t a failed abortion attempt with parents that cycled between abuse and neglect, and that you were taught and learned all the right things before you were thrown out into the world. Some people need freebies because they didn’t have the foundation you had and weren’t ready or prepared to face the world. Also, consider yourself blessed for your good genes. Not everyone is as awesome and holy as you.
Do woman get freebies by becoming wives?
If you are so smart and consider religion an intellectual en-devour, why not become Christian, since they have a stronger case in the historical and miracle department. I for one reject all miracles that imply a God, while accepting all the other incredible things that happen strangely in this world because you can't accept all of them. We are free to reject some, and Muhhameds stuff and Jesus's resurrection I just don't believe in. I believe most of the rest of history though. This is just an offer for you to have greater intellectual honesty. When assessing other people, you have to do it as a case by case situation
Well, I wasn't. I had to discover things by myself. I grew up surrounded by a wider environment of what later turned out to be cultural Marxists.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Charity is a core tenet of Islam. Either you are strong enough to pay it, or else, you are a legitimate recipient. There is no problem or shame in being a recipient of charity, if you truly need it. If I were truly needy, I would also accept charity.
Quoting Gregory
In Islam, it is the husband's job to keep the household funded. The wife does not need to fund it. If she makes her own money, she can spend it on anything that are not standard household expenses. As a husband, I do not need to provide a more expensive lifestyle than I can afford. For anything over and beyond that, a wife can seek to make her own money, if she wants to. Otherwise, she can also choose to be satisfied with what the husband can afford. Furthermore, in my own personal opinion, I do not want to encourage useless or meaningless materialism.
Quoting Gregory
Thinking that you are smart is a telltale sign of not being smart. According to the Dunning-Kruger research, the less someone is intelligent, the more he will believe that he is:
Quoting Wikipedia on Dunning-Kruger
So, that defines the term 'intelligence' as 'knowing when you do not know'. I think that their 1999 study, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" is one of the few really good contributions of psychology to the world. It certainly resonates with me.
Quoting Gregory
Even though there are no miracles in Islam, the Quran does not reject them either. That is also my own view on the matter.
Quoting Gregory
Islamic law regulates the principle inheritance for Muslims. Therefore, I do not see why someone would not inherit from his father. I will certainly not complain about that, as it is part of religious law. His father did not work for me or someone else to inherit his assets. He took care of his own children and that is the way it is supposed to be.
Quoting alcontali
Quoting alcontali
I call bullshit.
Quoting alcontali
"the truth"?
If, in your head, you have accountability to an imaginary friend rather than your fellow people, then what should others expect of you?
Exemplified by the Slender Man stabbing in 2014 resulting in decades-long sentences, and principally comparable to allegiance/accountability to someone/something rendered by faith and/or textual narratives alone. (Fortunately, such folk are rarely entirely consistent (non-hypocritical) in such a sentiment, or they would have forfeit autonomous moral agency.)
We don't derive/define morals from laws, scriptures, etc. Rather the opposite, laws are supposed to be moral. Whatever dictum has been set out, every one of us still has to personally figure out whether to follow it or not, and no manner of stories/faith can absolve that.
When you say "laws are supposed to be moral", you are comparing two descriptions, i.e. the description of a law versus the description of morality, in order to decide whether such law is moral or not.
Where is the description of morality that you use for this purpose?
Can you post a link to that document?
Confusing morality and ethics? Morality is based on scriptures, while ethics is a code for good and bad behaviour agreed on by society. At least that is how I understand the terms, although maybe not all dictionaries agree.
But we do have secular ethics, while I have never heard of secular morality.
There is actually a procedure in which they will double-check new laws in quite a few countries. They will check a new law against the constitution in order to determine whether it is constitutional or not. So, if we change the phrase "laws are supposed to be moral" to "laws are supposed to be constitutional", it would actually work.
There is, however, no document that describes "good and bad behaviour agreed on by society". In that sense, the whole idea of ethics is just fantasy, i.e. some kind of "imaginary friend" ! ;-)
Blah, blah, blah.
When are you going to answer the question?
I asked about the predisposition of people against getting an education, are they or are they not predisposed to avoid getting an education.
Quoting alcontali
I did not ask for your opinion of the education system, I asked about the predisposition of people against getting an education.
Quoting alcontali
No you don't, you pay under the terms of the place you choice to educate your kids. Nowhere do you get to chose anything more than what is being offered by the different school. Think about it, do you really go to the school and tell them how to educate the kids and what to teach them? Of course not, all you do is chose which of the terms being offered you will accept. EXACTLY the same as the people that CHOSE to pay student loans.
Quoting alcontali
Again, I did not ask for your opinion of of political systems, I asked how many islamic countries have free educational systems. I will make it easier for you. How many islamic countries have college level education systems that anyone can get financial help to study in?
Quoting alcontali
So, let's look at an imaginary scenario and try to put your way of thinking in context.
I am too poor to pay for my smart kid's education.
He has a dream of becoming a physicist and then going on to work to build cleaner energy systems and help make the world a better place.
The government offers him a loan so that fulfill his dream.
So allah will punish him for not accepting the truth that he is too poor to study and indulging in irresponsible behavior?
And then someone like you automatically labels him a born idiot that only wants to leech off the responsible people like you that are lucky enough to have enough money to pay for their kids.
I would like to see the statistics that you have used to decide that people that use student loans are all born idiots and never pay back the money, could you please supply a link to that information.
Quoting alcontali
So because their views are contrary to yours they have to be wrong. Why do you give charity to the community, is that the same as the freebies you so despise? You don't you insist on them paying their own way just like you do?
Saying that there should be no freebies for anyone then giving to charities makes you a hypocrite.
Quoting alcontali
It is obvious that you have never been and I sincerely hope that you never become poor.
Because as a poor person you will usually have only 2 options;
1. learn to beg, borrow and steal to get what you need.
2. Die a sad death.
I don't usually stoop to these levels of argument but I think the question is valid here.
If, as you say, allah provides for all that follow his rules, then why are there sooooo many hungry muslims?
Could it be that they were/are all born idiots.
pakar seo | jasa seo
Why is a document needed? If there were a document written up, what would validate it?
Yes, I do. I took my kids out of school for a whole year, appointed an (excellent) Filipina tutor for their English instead. Next, we travelled all together around SE Asia for the whole year. The result is that my kids are now fluent in English while their current classmates are absolutely not. So, I simply changed the priorities.
You see, the schools over here are truly clueless. They make exactly the same mistake as in France or in Germany. If you don't speak English fluently, you are professionally not going to get anywhere. You would just be able to find a job cleaning the bathrooms. In a serious coffee shop, you will not even be able to sling coffee, because even for that job they require English.
Quoting Sir2u
Saddling an entire generation with usury-infested student-loan debt? Wow. Do you want a revolution, or yet another insurgency, or what?
By the way, saddling someone with usury-infested loans is not the same as giving that person "help".
In that case, you are not helping the student. Instead, you will be helping the banksters that will originate these loans and who will make endless amounts of money from charging usury on them. You will also be helping the universities who will be able to pay million-dollar salary to their principal and faculty deans. The students? Not so much. With their worthless degree they will, more likely than not, end up in a dead-end part-time job slinging coffees at Starbucks.
You really do not seem to understand the student loan crisis, do you?
Quoting hbr.org on 'What Will It Take to Solve the Student Loan Crisis?'
You seem to think that your simplistic way of reasoning is solving a problem. No, it is creating problems! If you want to learn how to solve problems, then study some engineering instead of your liberal-art nonsense. Do something "hard" for a change! As I have told you earlier, your simple minded views do not solve the problem. No, they are the problem!
In an illiterate society there is no need to document anything, not even the laws. Nothing. So, the real question becomes: Why are we reading and writing, instead of just saying things?
Or we could just invent things on the fly without committing to them?
That would allow us to retract what we said when it suit us. Yes, agreed, there are indeed numerous benefits to not writing down anything.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Yes, indeed. That is an interesting question!
That is why I am on the floor laughing when I read about "good and bad behaviour agreed on by society". As I already have mentioned, that is obviously just fantasy. All of that is simply imaginary. There are no such agreements, let alone, documented ones, simply because there will be no way to validate them.
Do you really see Donald Trump agreeing with Elisabeth Warren on a thing like that?
In that sense, I am not the one referring to "imaginary friends", because the religious scriptures really exist, while the atheist fantasy of "good and bad behaviour agreed on by society" is just imaginary. It is obviously just fantasy!
Yeah, this wouldn't make sense in an illiterate society. However, in an illiterate society there are still social norms (which was what first came to mind for me when I read your point about "good and bad behaviors for society" needing a document which puzzled me a little.)
We might think a little differently on this. For me, it's not so much a matter of "validation" as it is just that the rule itself exists.
For instance, I don't know if it's written down anywhere but it's a commonly accepted etiquette rule that if two men are in a public restroom you don't take the urinal right next to the other one. There's a ton of public restroom etiquette. I have no idea what "validates" it but I still consider it a social norm.
If the rule really exists, then it should be possible to write it down, no?
So, why don't they do it?
I think that it is obvious that the religious scriptures exist, links galore, while the atheist "good and bad behaviour agreed on by society" does not. We have documented rules while the atheists don't. Therefore, it is clearly the atheists who keep referring to their "imaginary friend" to make a point, and not us.
Constitutions are written by people, so yes we are back to a definition based on society. As opposed to morality based on religion, which supposedly comes from god, so can not be discussed.
Don´t really see how what you write contradicts what I said.
Yes, you could write them down. However, there's a ton of these social norms and rules and they change according to the specific situation, but nonetheless you could write at least some of them down. I'm sure there's etiquette books available on the subject. As to which one of these etiquette books is the "validator" I have no idea.
If I'm not mistaken, this is how autistic people receive help. A lot of rules and social norms that neurotypical people are able to intuitively grasp autistic people struggle with and they need explicit reinforcement.
Social rules are different from morality though. When it comes to social rules everyday we just unthinkingly abide by many rules which are not explicitly written out which can be tricky for some people.
When it comes to Morality, Religion has provided zilch. Religion was just a venue for ancient humans to impose rules and create order. Through myths and stories. Morality already exists in Nature, as evolutionary beings we care about well being.
Clearly in this day and age, religious myths are not needed since the supernatural stories are superfluous. They provide no substance.
My remark was concerning the following statement:
Quoting jorndoe
I was just pointing out that it would be possible to fix the last sentence by writing:
Requiring laws to be moral (or ethical) requires the existence of a second document, which would be the benchmark of atheist morality (or ethics) and which is a fantasy that only exists in the imagination of atheists. That document is therefore their "imaginary friend". ;-)
Quoting alcontali
No, in an illiterate society, information is passed on orally. Which actually was the case for islam, where the Koran was passed on orally for 200 years, before someone put it to paper. Before that, it was all mouth to mouth. And yes, you are correct, it is reasonable to assume people added things to to it "on the fly".
The Haddith, the other leg of islamic morality, actually show this islamic telephone game clearly. It is all "as narrated by xxx who heard it narrated from yyy who heard it narrated from zzz" etc. So no, you do NOT need paper to pass on information, although of course it helps.
No, I know for a fact that this is not true.
No matter how many times we have asked atheists to do that, they haven't, even though they perfectly well know that it is the Achilles heel of atheism. The truth is that they just cannot do it. Otherwise they would have done it a long time ago already.
You can't write down every single social rule for every single social situation. You could, however, say, write down an article describing bathroom etiquette. They do exist out there.
In any case I don't see how something being written down now "validates it."
If I just listed a bunch of rules now those rules would be written down but I don't know how that would suddenly validate them.
Atheism may reject God's law, i.e. tenets and rules, but it clearly does not propose alternative tenets or rules. That entails that there would be no need for moral rules. Hence, according to the atheist view, all behaviour would be equally moral.
There are every serious problems with that view: this view is trivialist.
Quoting Wikipedia on trivialism
Trivialism occurs when the beliefs contain a contradiction:
Quoting Wikipedia on the principle of explosion
Hence, there is necessarily an underlying contradiction in "We, atheists, reject all rules and tenets but we also do not propose any other ones either", because otherwise, it would not lead to asserting a trivialist result. Hence, the atheist take on morality is simply unsustainable.
Furthermore, I have never met an atheist who rejects the idea of "right and wrong", i.e. the existence of permissible and impermissible behaviour. Even atheists clearly believe that this distinction exists. However, they are not capable, not even to save themselves from drowning, to document what the rules could be for distinguishing between good and bad behaviour.
You see, (most) religious people still respect other religions, because in model-theoretical terms, such alternative religious theory often still has a model that satisfies their religious theory. Hence, it is potentially even a sustainable approach. Atheism, on the other hand, does not survive scrutiny. Their theory simply has no model at all.
Since atheism is not a belief system in itself, just the absence of one, it is absurd to ask for atheist rules. However, if you are talking about ethics, yes, an atheist ethical system is possible, simply by starting with some basic rules that modern societies agree upon, such as the Golden Rule. Check out Sam Harris if you want to dive into that.
Religionists of course can bypass all that by simply referring to their scriptures. The problem with that is that a lot of those are problematic for modern societies. Islam is particular example for that.
That is a non sequitur. The disbelief in a god does not mean there is no need for ethics. In fact, an ethical code is necessary for any society.
Also, you seem to forget that religionists too are atheists.... in all religions except one. Or do you believe in Lord Shiwa or Hoitsuptsli?
Apparently you have not heard of Sam Harris, who spends a lot of his time addressing precisely this issue. Check out his work and come back before posting more opinions.
The hadiths are documented now. It does not matter today that they were initially transmitted orally. That only mattered in the period during which they were orally transmitted. That period is history now. Furthermore, all information is initially undocumented until it is. If information cannot be undocumented until it is, then no information could ever be documented.
Documenting information allows it to be objectively transmitted. It also allows the information be stored without alterations. Civilization has been keeping written records for thousands of years now.
Well, no. That is not absurd.
Atheism rejects all other rules without proposing alternative ones, while still accepting the idea that such rules are necessary. That is clearly the fundamental contradiction in atheism. Atheism would only be sustainable if it either switched to a trivialist morality ("there is no morality needed") or proposes an alternative ("our own rules").
It does mean that there is no need for ethics in atheism, because it rejects all other, existing rules for ethics without proposing an alternative take on ethics. Therefore, from atheism necessarily entails a trivialist take on morality.
I understand that and I completely agree but I think rational people can agree that just because something is written down or it's in a beautiful book somewhere doesn't immediately give it authority or make it a source of authority.
The fact that information is documented does not necessarily give it authority. It is simply strong evidence that the information exists.
There is simply no evidence that atheist morality exists. If it exists, it can be documented. So, where can we read a copy of the documentation?
You sound very confused here. By definition, atheism is simply a disbelief in good. It does not "reject" any ethical system, it simply does not address any. Atheism in itself is not a belief system, so it is meanigless to compare it to one.
Living in a society of ourse requires a code of ethics, and as I said it is possible to create one without referring to Allah, Yahwe, Neptune, Zeus, or Hoitsipotsli.
That period lasted for hundreds of years, so for an extremely long time, muslim morality was simply transmitted orally... something you claimed is impossible.
"Believing" in a religion means that you accept the religion's moral rules as a matter of self-discipline. So, if an atheist accepts, for example, the moral rules of Christianity, then he is simply a Christian and not an atheist. The same is true for an atheist who keeps the moral rules of Islam, or any religion for that matter.
Furthermore, an atheist who is consistent will not accept God's law while simultaneously rejecting the lawmaking God. That behaviour does not make sense. Seriously, why would he do that? Why would he put in effort in keeping the self-discipline mandated by a God in whom he does not believe? How would he motivate that to himself?
Seriously, it does not make sense to accept God's law while rejecting God. It is again contradictory.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Well, if it is possible to do that, then why don't you just do it?
I did not claim that it was impossible. Can you quote me on that?
Nope, that is a non sequitur. One does not follow from the other. And, as I pointed out, it is possible to construct an ethical code without referring to religion. Are you reading messages before responding to them?
Your statement "the atheist..." is a nonsensical statement. For the reasons I mentioned above. Not all atheists think the same. The only thing atheists have in common is their disbelief in a God/Gods.
You wrote:
[i]In an illiterate society there is no need to document anything, not even the laws. Nothing. So, the real question becomes: Why are we reading and writing, instead of just saying things?
Or we could just invent things on the fly without committing to them?
That would allow us to retract what we said when it suit us. Yes, agreed, there are indeed numerous benefits to not writing down anything.[/i]
I understood that to be sarcasm and an argument for written scriptures. So you meant that literally?
Quoting alcontali
Once again you are contradicting yourself. First you say that you can tell the schools what to do, then you say that you had to take your kids out of school to do what you wanted to do with them. Make up your mind.
Quoting alcontali
Once again you are you are failing to answer a simple question. If you don't have an answer it would be easier to say so instead of repeating yourself with non answers I do not want.
Quoting alcontali
Apart from the fact that you have not shown any data to even prove that this crisis exists, I understand it perfectly and I don't care about it. I doubt that anyone put a gun to anyone's head and forced them to take a loan. So it is not my problem.
If you read the article you provided a link to it says that many students are using other methods of obtaining an education, so there are alternative ways if the people were not too lazy to look for and consider other ways to do things. If they are lazy, then they deserve the wrath allah, thor, apollo and anyone else.
Quoting alcontali
Sadly I have not tried to solve the problems of anyone else. I solve my own and those I get paid to solve.
Quoting alcontali
You are certainly a presumptuous little man are you not. If you had asked, or bothered to look at any of my other posts would feel stupid after making this comment.
I have a degree in engineering and design of factories.
I am a qualified welder
I am a qualified plumber
I am a qualified electrician
I am qualified to work on automobile and marine engines and drive systems
I have designed and built several house including the one I live in that survived an earthquake of 7.3
What the fuck have you done with your pompous little life?
Who the hell would be interested in writing down a bunch of rules that most people follow without knowing because they are just plain ordinary common sense. Nobody needs a written rule that tells you when you can or cannot beat your wife. They apparently have those written into islamic moral laws though.
Let me ask you a couple of questions. How many atheist are condemned to prison for immoral acts? How many religious people are sentenced for the same crimes?
When you have that information then I will believe that atheists are the bad guy that the data shows them to be.
Quoting alcontali
Atheism does not reject god's laws, if it can even be proven that they are his to begin with. Atheism rejects the idea of gods existing.
Where is written, as you insist on things being written down to be valid, that there HAS TO BE written moral laws or tenets to guide human behavior?
How does the fact that atheist have no written rules mean that we don't have need for them or have none?
And how can you state at the same time that atheists have no laws and then say that according to atheist laws.
It appears to me that you should start to think about what you write because you are continuously contradicting yourself.
If I propose an alternative to islamic laws about wife beating, would you guys pay any attention? of course not because my rules are not written in a pretty little book that is supposed to have some sort of authority. But wait a minute, who authorized your little book anyway? Why is your little book any more authorized to be the guide to human morality than the bible, the Torah, or The Lord of the Rings. Personally I would adopt the last if I had to make a choice about moral guidelines for my life, it is much more realistic.
Quoting alcontali
Not accepting a god's law and behaving properly according to the society in which one lives are not at all contradictory.
Quoting alcontali
So if you live in a society that is not islamic, you would not respect their ideals, laws and so on? Most atheist can get along with anyone and everyone that also respects their point of view whilst disagreeing with it. An atheist is usually self motivated to get along with the rest of humanity because it would be just plain bloody stupid to antagonize the people around you all of the time.
I have lived and visited in many countries in Europe and the Americas and have never had any problems adapting to their way of life. If you look at the situation in Europe right now you will see that the muslims that go there to take advantage of the freebie system fail drastically to adapt the their new home and spend most of the time trying to live exactly as they did in the old country which they were too happy to escape from.
I am still waiting for an answer to my questions.
I'm not really aiming to get into another conversation about atheist morality right now.
I'd like to stick with the social rules/norms issue: Do you not believe in social norms/social rules or etiquette because there is no one God-given source which includes all of them? I'm just curious as to your thoughts on how these rules are justified, if they are at all in your opinion.
I think that we should just start by making notes of the rules so that we can categorize them later and them put them in hierarchical order.
I have at least one rule that I would definitely like to see in the book, but I am not sure if it would be right to do it here or in a new thread so that everyone interested in living a moral life under the atheistic code of morality can add their ideas for consideration.
One of the most import laws that we should include is as follows.
One should avoid at all costs that the animals kept in one's house as domestic pets be allowed to defecate on the lawn of the neighbor.
What do you guys think?
I vote yay on this proposal.
I'd like to propose the urinal rule: If in a public restroom with many urinals available, do not utilize the one directly next to a stranger. Additionally do not strike up a chat with said stranger.
Honestly I'm fine continuing here as kind of a joke. Obviously it's just not possible to account for every single rule for every single circumstance. I wasn't quite following your previous discussion with alcontali but we were discussing a similar topic.
Atheists unite against the behemoth of the religious sects. Let's make a stand and formalize our institution. Then we can claim equal rights and tax privileges like the rest of them do.
:rofl:
OOOOHhhhhhhh nooooo.
How would all of those poor kids that never get to see a woman naked until they are married to one get an education?
We need a rule about that for our moral code, let me think.
Thou shall not do evil to those that try to bring happiness to the masses.
That should stop those idiots going to court.
Forbid thy tongue from mentioning those to which there is no evidence of existence.
That should stop them from blabbing about lost souls. Fucks up Santa Clause as well but you cannot eat your cake ad have it at the same time can you.
If it is possible, then why don't you do it?
And if you did it, then where is it documented?
Stick around pal, we are working on it as you try to get the knot out of your knickers.
This is the art of life.
Isn't it obvious that I created my own school for the year? Currently, they are at a local, private school to learn and practice reading/writing local language, which uses even a completely different alphabet. So, that will take a bit of time. In fact, it is a combination of private schools. As soon as they are finished doing that, the question will be: What are they supposed to do in high school? I do not like the schools' take on that either. Therefore, I may have to create my own school again by hiring a local (or Filipino teacher), and instruct that person to teach a particular curriculum.
Quoting Sir2u
Ha aha ha! The student debt crisis in the US would not even exist! What a joke!
Quoting Sir2u
Well, yeah, some people still have a brain while others don't. Welcome to the real world!
Quoting Sir2u
I don't want to brag about that because that will quickly sound arrogant, but I am more than happy with my life! ;-)
So where is the information about it. One article does not prove anything. If the crisis exists it must be written down somewhere. Let's see the numbers, how many students, how much money, that sort of thing might be believable.
Quoting alcontali
It is a shame that more people are not wealthy enough to live in your real world.
Quoting alcontali
Where I come from we only brag about things when something can be gained from it. It is usually better to state the facts.
By the way do you plan on answering any of my questions or are you just going to continue spouting articles from the internet?
Under particular, explicitly stated conditions it is acceptable in Islam. In fact, it was reasonably acceptable in western society too, until they changed the rules. The same is true for corporal punishment of children. It simply depends on the rules of your moral system.
Quoting Sir2u
That phenomenon is relative to secular laws. The count would be different if it were relative to religious law. The term "crime" simply does not mean the same thing in different legal systems.
Quoting Sir2u
I never said that "atheists are the bad guy". That is not what it is about. In fact, that cannot possibly be what it is about, because we are talking about systems that define what "the bad guy" means. Depending on the moral system that you use, the term "the bad guy" obviously means something else.
Quoting Sir2u
I use the fact that the information is available in written form as evidence for the fact that information actually exists. You can indeed try to use another principle to provide evidence for the existence of information. I am not against that. However, if information exists, it should be possible to write it down. So, when you claim that information exists, I will simply ask for a copy of its written form.
Quoting Sir2u
Again, there is not one, single religious community which keeps the rules of just one scripture. Each religious community has its own scripture. As I have mentioned before, I do not assume that the scripture of another religious community would be wrong. This is also not the view in Islam. On the contrary, the Torah, the Gospels, and the Psalms are specifically mentioned in the Quran as holy books, i.e. alternative legitimate scriptures.
Quoting Sir2u
In all practical terms, it could very well mean "not accepting God's law but still keeping God's law", which is effectively contradictory.
Quoting Sir2u
In the Islamic view, non-Muslims cannot be required to keep Islamic law. Therefore, in an Islamic society, each religious community has its own legal system. There are a few complications with that approach but they are certainly not insurmountable. There are quite a few countries that operate along traditional, pre-colonial lines, such as India, Malaysia, and Lebanon, just to name a few.
Except for some British former colonies, where the British colonial power was wise enough to understand why it was better to leave things as they were (with a legal system per religious community), western colonization has dramatically disturbed the legal situation in these former colonies. For example, it took a long civil war in Lebanon to reinstate the former Ottoman system of one legal system per religious community and in that way achieve peace again.
The ever ongoing wars in the Middle East are actually about two things: (1) getting rid of the colonial project of creating the apartheid state of Israel (2) reinstating the Ottoman-Islamic principle of one legal system per religious community.
Quoting Sir2u
No, because each religious community must have its own legal system. As far as I am concerned, it is unreasonable to expect believers of one religion to keep the laws of another religion.
Quoting Sir2u
I do not have any moral qualm in exploiting freebie systems either. Morality emerges from your moral system. Unless your moral system forbids particular behaviour, this behaviour is deemed permissible. Therefore, I see no problem in helping to bankrupt a flawed freebie system by sucking it dry of its freebies. I would do that with a big smile on my face.
Furthermore, the gap in economic performance with the home countries of these immigrants is rapidly shrinking and has in quite a few cases already disappeared completely. For example, Malaysians are generally no longer be interested to move to the UK. That wouldn't make sense economically for most Malaysians. The economic imbalances in the world are disappearing and therefore the era of massive population movements too. It will have been a temporary phenomenon associated to the end of the colonial era.
Yeah, that is obvious. The problem is full of contradictions, and you clearly have no solution for that.
I was just pointing out how silly the simplistic atheist views are in that realm. Atheists do not think things through, because if they did, they would see by themselves that their point of view is highly inconsistent.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
In a formal system of morality, it will not be possible to justify its first principles from within the system itself. The reason for that is very simple: It is never possible to justify the first principles of any formal system from within the system itself.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
For example, how are the first principles in number theory justified by number theory?
They obviously aren't, simply, because that is not possible.
The atheist view fails at a very, very basic level already.
Again, as I have mentioned earlier already, there are no blank slates. You cannot start reasoning from a blank page, because (propositional) logic itself is a formal system that rests on 14 basic beliefs, i.e. axioms, that from the point of view of logic appear as arbitrary, speculative, unjustified, and unjustifiable.
Hence, the seemingly blank page is governed by libraries full of consequences derived from these 14 basic beliefs. It is not blank at all !
The atheist approach is a silly exercise in infinite regress resulting from total ignorance about how formal systems work. Either you reason within the system, or else you reason about the system, because in all other cases, you are just doing some unfeasible form of system-less bullshit.
Endlessly proclaiming the sanity of atheism seems to be something for liberal-art idiots who have never been asked to reason about something that is actually "hard". The typical employer in the labour market is right: Liberal arts are stupid. These fake subjects teach you to reason in an imbecile way. These people are only going to cause trouble with their rampant stupidity.
***Disclaimer: Drunk post here, but still probably sensical as I'm not too drunk***
I am not an atheist. This is not a "hey, I see you're religious, let me argue with that" conversation. That would be a waste of time. For the record, I am agnostic: God may or may not exist. I am amenable to considering either line of thinking or implications for either line of thought.
Okay, but we're not talking about morality here. Every "ought" statement is not necessarily a "moral" statement.
Example: "You ought to place the fork on the left of the plate."
2: "You ought to travel down highway A as opposed to highway B if you're going to this walmart."
I didn't engage you here to destroy your belief system. I'm engaging you here because I genuinely want to learn what you have to say so that it can help me. That is the purpose of this discussion so stop viewing it as a battle. If you have ideas you'd like to bounce off me I'm happy to do that as well. That is, after all, philosophy. It is a selfish endeavour.
If you want to teach me about number theory I'm all ears. I dropped Calc 1 because it was too difficult.
I also don't believe in "blank slate" either. All I was asking you is how do you incorporate non-moral oughts into your system. I have my own thoughts on this, but I would rather hear yours because I already know my own.
You ask 178432 different questions and then you still expect just one answer.
So, no, I just pick one question of your 178432 questions, and I only deal with that. Once we are finally done with that one question, we can move on to the next question.
So, what is the one next question? And not the 178432 next questions ...
Quoting alcontali
Quoting alcontali
I give up with you.
You consistently refuse to answer any question that is asked and you are a bullshitting hypocrite.
Don't bother to answer.
And you cannot even count. Where the hell is the facepalm smilie when I need it?
That question is relevant to religion but not to religious law.
Religious law is a formal system of rules. In that sense, it just behaves as any formal system of rules. It has a foundation of basic rules and then a whole body of conclusions/theorems that syntactically entail from these basic rules.
Seriously, "God may or may not exist" is not a relevant question in religious law.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
East Asians generally do not even eat with a fork and knife. They rather use chopsticks.
Since there is no rule in religious law that mentions what tools you should use to eat with, this question does not even come within the purview of religious law.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
In that case, it will no longer be a formal system of morality. A legitimate formal system of morality can only mirror the relevant moral rules.
Ha ha ha!
Exploiting a government subsidy system is not considered to be a form of theft by lots of people while breaking into your neighbour's house to steal money certainly is.
Seriously, if any demographic manages to bankrupt the state treasury by extracting and exacting all kinds of benefits out of it, this will only bring a smile to my face. It is a stupid system anyway. So, yes, please, sink it!
I understand that and I agree with you, and if you've sided more to the theistic side I'm fine hearing your explanation for why that is. Personally, I was raised Jewish. I am now agnostic. If we're going to engage theistic thinking I'm partial to Jewish lines of thought when it comes to questions of God's nature.
It is nonetheless an issue and a social norm in the US. It just is a reality whether we like it or not. I understand it is social custom; it is always the way I was taught. There are a billion of these social rules that we abide by in everyday life.
Fair enough, but they are still truths. They are an interesting category of truths because despite most people having an implicit understanding of them they are rarely made explicit. I mentioned this point earlier when it came to autistics. I think a similar thing could be said those without an innate moral sense or sense of rhythm.
It is possible, I did it, and actually most humans do it inately (principles like fairness, empathy, and compassion do not need some religious books, they are inate to humans).
If you want documentation, again, read Sam Harris.
Yes, religion, quite unfortunately in my opinion, doesn't stand up to scrutiny even in the very area it's supposed to be an authority, the moral domain, and to aggravate the situation, its claims about the world and universe at large have been disproved by science, negatively impacting its credibility as a whole. However, we can't deny the fact that morality's core claims are about how the world should be and ergo should be exempt from testing against facts, the way the world is; the only relevance of facts to morality is as a comparison, an undesirable state of affairs, to an envisioned better world. In other words, it matters not that science contradicts religion on the matter of things like when the earth was formed or whether the earth is the center of the universe, etc. for these are irrelevant to the sine qua non of religion - morality.
We should not generalize about "religion", just like we should not generalize about "ideology". There are very different ones out there, with very different outcomes for society. Some of them do not even have a god or gods, so they do not even tangent the whole atheism debate.
God's nature is not part of religious law, which is limited to the morality of human behaviour only. Rabbinic (Jewish) law is also pretty much a formal system of morality (just like Islamic law). Therefore, I believe that a project to mechanically verify the justification of religious advisories in Jewish law could also be successful. It is just that there seem to be fewer advisories available in Jewish jurisprudence. So, it could be harder to validate the scripts against an existing knowledge database (because it is so much smaller).
I am personally not much of a hero in the realm of discussing God's nature. I do not peruse that type of literature often enough to be familiar with any deeper insights.
It is mostly because I like formal systems in general that I am so attracted to religious law.
Religious law (in Islam and Rabbinic orthodox Judaism but not necessarily in other religions) is clearly also a formal system but then for morality (instead of number theory or so). I find it truly fascinating. So, yes, I would also be interested in a project around mechanical verification in Jewish law.
"Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism."
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
Imagine that we design a horror moral system with the following basic rules:
rule 1: You must kill everybody else
rule 2: Since everybody else will also be trying to kill you, keep ducking for the bullets
rule 3: and so on
In that case, I would still be interested in a project to figure out if the justification for conclusions/theorems in the horror moral system can be verified mechanically from its basic rules. It still looks like an interesting project to me. So, I want to fire up the Coq proof assistant and see where I can get.
What Schopenhauer was doing, was something completely different. He was rather interested in shit talking other people by incessantly using infinite regress, fake blank pages, and other system-less bullshit. That is a completely different exercise in a completely different subject matter. I am simply not interested in that kind of nonsense. It is rather something for the liberal-art idiots. Schopenhauer would never have been able to use the Coq proof assistant (let alone to write a program like that), because he was just too stupid for that.
Schopenhauer is one of the great philosophers of all time (and you are not).
Schopenhauer studied the content of islam critically (and you obviously did not.)
By the way, all great thinkers who studied islam came out with similar warnings. Of course, today in the current PC climate, they would all be accused of "islamophobia" or similar BS.
That is just a typical western ethnocentric view on philosophy. If you ask a Chinese, an Arab, or an African about Schopenhauer, they will all say that he is just a filthy piece of shit. And I agree with that point of view, because what the hell did that idiot know about other cultures and civilizations? Did he ever even go there? How far did that imbecile retard manage to travel outside Germany? Huh?
At the same time, there are lots of Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Africans who would love to use the Coq proof assistant. They think it is great!
Schopenhauer, Nietsche, and all the other imbeciles have no universal appeal whatsoever. At best, they are popular with a limited audience in a few western countries (not even all). This audience is deeply invested themselves in infinite regress and other system-less bullshit. That is why they like that kind of useless crap. Seriously, it may be moderately amusing to talk bullshit about "Ubermenschen" and "Untermenschen", but what other value could it possible have? Yeah, maybe Hitler will like too, That is the only use it has. Seriously, it is idiots writing bullshit for other idiots.
Quoting Nobeernolife
No, no, no. System-less bullshit is not the same as critical thinking.
For example, it is not because you do not understand mathematics, not even to save yourself from drowning, that you are "critically thinking about" mathematics. Again, that is just liberal-arts bullshit. They think that they know but they obviously don't. It is just a bunch of ignorant and arrogant idiots. Furthermore, I am not the only person who thinks like that. Employers clearly believe that too. That is why these liberal-arts born losers should just go coffee slinging in their part-time job at Starbucks.
Quoting Nobeernolife
But it really is ignorant bullshit. It does not just "seem" like that. It really is. Seriously, what do they actually know about the subject? These guys are just a bunch of imbecile retards.
Oh really now. Do you have a source for that? How many Chinese, African, or non-muslim Arabs have you asked about that? None of the philosophy students that I know would call Schopenhauer a "piece of shit".
Do you also think Voltaire is a "piece of shit"?
The Koran teaches fear, hatred, contempt for others. Murder as a legitimate means of spreading and maintaining this devil's doctrine. It denigrates women, divides people into classes and demands blood and more blood. (VOLTAIRE)
Ah, I forgot to mention: Both Nietzsche and Hitler were fond of islam.
So you do have some influential voices on your side. However Nietzsches brain was affected by Syphillis, and Hitler... well, maybe you count him among the great philosophers, but I do not.
Well, there are so many people, including our dear friend Leonard Euler, who thought that Voltaire was a piece of shit that there is no need to further swell the ranks. Voltaire was simply known, even famous, for being a witty, funny, professional shit talker.
By the way:
Quoting Wikipedia on Voltaire
That seems like the only factual statement Voltaire made about Islam. It wasn't even a subject that he wasted particularly much time on. He vastly preferred talking shit about Christianity.
Voltaire was a funny guy, but besides mocking other people, has he actually contributed anything worth mentioning to humanity? I have ran into Euler's work while doing stuff that has made me good money. Who has ever been able to put Voltaire's calumnies to good use? Obviously, not anybody.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Well, I doubt it matters. When a person writes a complete book, such as 'Mein Kampf', that only shit talks about other people and nothing else, then what are we supposed to think about the author? Seriously, he does not say anything good about absolutely anybody in that book. It is one long rant about everybody he hates. Sorry, but I have no respect for that kind of people.
Well, that is good for you, however keep in mind that Hitler was and is vastly popular in the muslim world, so a lot of your co-religionists disagree with you there.
Not vastly.
Some Muslims may conclude things too quickly on grounds of short-sighted political considerations, but anybody who understands what he really meant to say, cannot possibly like his vast collection of endless hate speech, unless he is a born hater himself.
As soon as they would get to know the details of his true nature, they would repudiate and disavow him. It is the same mentality as later on Milosevic: a born and professional shit talker of vitriolic hate speech.
Oh really now. Would that include Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Yussuf Al-Qaradafi, its current head cleric?
These clerics are not as close as you or me to what happened in the 1930ies and 1940ies in German-occupied Europe. They would never advocate things like "All the Gypsies have to die". Come on, on what grounds would they be able to justify such a thing as clerics?
For a starters, in Islam you cannot do something like "kill all the Gypsies", because that is incompatible with confiscating their girls, whom you cannot kill, because that is utmost contrary and incompatible with the true biological goal of males fighting in the mating season, i.e. "war".
The Nazis were a regime of hate, about sheer hate only, and run by born haters, who in their hate even managed to overrule very basic biological principles, such as through their policy of Rassenschande. The Quran is totally opposed to that.
I am quite sure that these clerics just lifted a few sentences out of context and then reused them in another conflict in order to score quick and easy political points. In fact, you'd better quote exactly what they have said, because you may even be seriously misrepresenting their views.
I don´t know what you are trying to say. I am pointing to the deep connection between islamic ideology and nazism, and you keep writing obscure denials.
So, according to you the inspiration for Mein Kampf was the Quran? Or something like that?
Islam is a book. All information about Nazism is also a book. What would according to you be the deep connection between these two books?
I don´t know what the inspiration for Mein Kampf was, and I said nothing about that.
I was pointing out to you that contrary to what you claimed, Hitler admired islam, that influential muslim figures did and do support nazism, and that that nazism is popular in the muslim world even today, There is no need to misquote me.
Quoting The Nazi Romance with Islam
Ok, I see what Hitler apparently said about Islam and how he tried to endear himself with the Muslim community. Fine, I get that.
Concerning what the Muslim community thought about Hitler:
Quoting The Nazi Romance with Islam
As I suspected, the Muslims did not trust him, and they were obviously right. Even though they did not know the nitty-gritty details of Hitler's true nature, they were suspicious of his intentions. Now, the author suggests that the Egyptians may have felt some kind of loyalty to the British, but I seriously doubt that too.
You see, some Muslims may have fallen for Hitler's propaganda. I am quite sure that some must have done that. Hitler was undoubtedly excellent at shit talking about the British and their colonial politics. However, we can all sense that you should not trust this kind of persons without thoroughly investigating their character first. Hitler's character was utmost ugly. Just read what he wrote in Mein Kampf and how he spewed hate on an endless list of enemies. He never said anything good about anybody. He was just hating and hating and hating. I am confident that Muslims who read his venom understood that you cannot ever trust a person like that; and according to the author, they clearly didn't.
Not just some muslims. The Mufti of Jerusalem was in Germany during WW2, advising Hitler on the Jewish issue and raising muslim troops for the Nazis. And Mein Kampf is a bestseller in the muslim world even today. I think the source you found tries to whitewash that a bit.
https://thepeoplescube.com/images/images_working/Hitler_Muslims/Mufti_Hitler.jpg
The Mufti of Jerusalem was obviously trying to create alliances left and right with a view on preventing the creation of the apartheidsstate of Israel. That does not mean in any fashion that he subscribed to the Nazi ideology, which is simply not compatible with Islam. It is also obvious that it is rather the racist apartheidsstate of Israel that is ideologically close to Nazism.
You see, Islamic law is a complete formal system with rules concerning morality. It is not possible to just mix it haphazardly with system-less bullshit such as nazism or communism. At best, it is possible to lift single, individual concerns, one by one, from such ideology and then figure out in what way Islam would agree to address such concern. So, don't count on any serious mufti or any other alim to join that kind of parties. He just won't do it.
Splendid idea! So all we need to know now is what is and more particularly, what ought to be. Especially because we are talented at knowing what the former is from experience, but pathetic at understanding our future. Do you have any ideas?
There was no concept of Israel at the the time. However, there was the ongoing holocaust, which the mufti admired. And he expressed his point of view clearly:
"The friendship between Muslims and Germans has become much stronger because National Socialism corresponds to the Islamic world view in many respects. The points of contact are: Monotheism and unity of leadership. Islam as an organizing force. The struggle, the community, the family and the offspring. The relationship to the Jews. The glorification of work and creation."
Muhammed Amin Al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, Berlin, October 1944
In an earlier period, there was not particularly much of a political mutual understanding, because Nazi Germany was expelling Jews out of Germany who then ended up in Palestine:
Quoting Wikipedia on Relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world
In fact, at that point in time, the Nazis were much more interested in collaborating with Zionist organizations than with the Mufti. It is only in 1938 that Germany's policy became aligned with the Mufti, when Germany finally agreed to stop expelling Jews to Palestine:
Quoting Relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world
So, in 1944, the Nazis had already switched from collaborating with Zionist organizations to siding with the Mufti on the issue of expelling German Jews to Palestine. The Nazis had stopped sending European Jews to Palestine by then. Any positive declaration by any of the parties involved, can only be understood in that light.
The Jews attacked whole populations in the Old Testament. Christians think Jesus stopped this, but they have no evidence Jesus didn't kill anybody. Organized religions stemming back hundreds and thousands of years are burdened with these problems. Mormonism wants to take over the West. Protestants say they have the Spirit. Everyone running around they hold the future. If Nietzsche was so dumb how did he predict these conundrums?
You are not a historian, and your selected Wikipedia snippets do not change the ideologial similarities between Islam and Nazism, as outlined by Ali Al Husseini. The Mufti was also busy recruiting Islamic Nazi SS regiments, in particular in Yugoslavia, who were busy murdering Christians and opponents of the Nazis. The holocaust is praised islamist worldwide today, if you are unaware of that, good for you, but it does not change the reality.
I have little to no idea how the world should be but to pain with a broad brush how about making hedonism, a "better" version of it, a first principle; after all even animals seek pleasure and avoid pain. A hedonistic first principle would unite all animal life and that reminds me of a the garden of Eden - a place of peace and happiness where all living things live in harmony. The next step would be to bring other kingdom, plants, into the fold of morality and that will be difficult; we have to eat something and to do that we have to kill. Perhaps synthetic food isn't too far off in the future.
2) Muslims are simply using The Secret to try to get into a sexual paradise, like many people do, excepting Christians
3) The no boundary hypothesis and the doctrine that there is no time without motion create a scenario where there is no need for a creator.
4) Islam is the meaning some people find given to them and which they impose on themselves and others within this self-contained universe. Just because a religion gives you meaning, this does not mean that it is the meaning of the universe.
That is the problem right there. I have no issue with "religion", in fact I tend to think having a religion is healthy for a societ. The problem with islam is that it is a "poligion", a political ideology with a religious cover, complete with political system and legal system --- and not a political and legal system that any person who looks at it objectively would want to live under.
Can islam be stripped of its Sharia and political ambitions and turned into a pure religion? That is an open question. Majid Navas thinks so, other like Bassam Tibi are sceptical.
I am not interested in figuring everything that you are not, because I do not consider you personally to be a sufficiently interesting subject for that purpose. By the way, should I be flattered by the fact that you seem to have nothing better to do than analyzing and studying my person?
In fact, I rarely object when pretty, young women do that in the physical world, but in my opinion, it does not make sense to do that here online because, in the end, there is no convenient way to act on it.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Well, apparently he was lying in bed with the devil for reasons of political expediency, assuming that the end would justify the means. Some people will end up making Faustian pacts. So? Would that be the first time in the history of mankind? And now, feel free to tell me something interesting instead.
No, the mufti explained clearly why he like Nazism, and that affinity is inherent in islam and continues today. Consider that the holocaust is widely considered Allah`s good work, that muslims should continue today. So, no Faustian pact here, but congruent ideologies.
You very well know that any elusive connection between Islam and Nazism is much more of a stretch than between Zionism and Nazism.
Zionism and Nazism are obviously much closer to each other, since they are both a pile of very racist, system-less bullshit. The core of both ideologies is unadulterated racism.
On the other hand, if you listen to even the most extreme and radical Muslims, such as Osama bin Laden or so, or even to some people in the ISIS crowd, have you ever heard them referring to Nazi literature?
Have you ever heard them making the kind of racist remarks that both Nazis and Zionists routinely make?
Racism is not part of Islam, while it is the core foundation of Nazism and Zionism.
No, I do not know that, and the claim is quite absurd. Zionism is the claim for a territory for Jews. Nazism is a totalitarian ideologys that includes a rabid hatred of Jews, which it shares with islam (as Ali Al Husseini pointed out).
Quoting alcontali
Well, that depends how you define "racism". The Koran is chock-full of hate against Jews, something it shares with Nazism. That why Al Husseini called it gingerly "The relationship to the Jews." The Nazi Jew hatred is probably founded in Hitlers crazy race theory, while the islamic Jew-hatred is based on the scripture.
The result is the same, however, which is why we have the similarity.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Quoting 'United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), 'determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination' .
Quoting 2009 World Conference against Racism
If there is one thing that the Zionist apartheidsstate of Israel fundamentally shares with Nazism, it is their well-attested racism. Seriously, how many times does the apartheidsstate of Israel need to be indicted for their disgusting racism before they will finally acknowledge the despicable error of their ways?
Whatever Israel does or does not do is irrelevant to the similarity between islam and nazism, which I was pointing out to you.
Has it ever occurred to you that the hysterical hatred of Israel by the muslim world is precisely because the hatred of Jews is part of islamic doctrine?
It is perfectly relevant to the uncanny similarity between Zionism and Nazism. They are both undeniably racist.
Quoting Nobeernolife
It is not part of Islamic doctrine.
You are deliberately confusing the utter dislike of the racist apartheidsstate of Israel with an imaginary non-existent antisemitism that only exists in your fantasy and not in the Middle East.
Furthermore, you conveniently keep ignoring that the holocaust took place in Europe and not in the Middle East.
As I have mentioned earlier, the holocaust could simply not have taken place in the Middle East or in any other Muslim-majority country because the Nazi policy of die Endlösung der Jüdenfrage is in violation of a long list of legal clauses in the Quran.
The reason why the holocaust could and did take place in Europe, is because multiple, elaborate racist ideologies were commonplace in that era, very similar to Zionism, while an already substantially weakened Christianity turned out to be no barrier against pseudo-scientific racism and against scientific genocidal extermination procedures of unwanted populations.
I do not see that. "Zionism" simply refers to the concept of a Jewish state. It is not a political system inn itself, it certainly does not resemble Nazism, since the Nazis wanted to erase the jews.
Quoting alcontali
It absolute is, which everybody who has read the Korann and Haddiths knows, and which islamist leaders have clearly stated
.
Your opinion is not even necessarily shared by other Jews. If they expected to be mishandled by the Muslims, why did the Sephardi Jews flee to the Muslim Ottoman Empire?
Quoting Wikipedia on Sephardi Jews
If the Muslims were full of hatred of the Jews, why on earth did these Sephardi Jews prefer to flee to an Islamic country? They could also have fled from Spain and Portugal to the north, for example, to France, Germany, or Britain, but they chose not to.
You want to depict the Muslim opposition to the racist apartheidsstate of Israel as a form of racism, but your story simply does not add up.
Is United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 also a form of antisemitism in your view? What about the 2009 World Conference against Racism, which voted to maintain the decades-old designation of 'racist country' for the Zionist apartheidsstate of Israel? Are they also antisemitic?
LOL, since when am I Jewish? That is news to me. Yes, Jews were persecuted by various rulers in the Middle ages, and they might actually have been relatively safer in the Ottoman empire as Dhimmis in the Millet system. That does not mean they were not discriminated there.
None of this invalidates the similarity between islam and nazism, for example in the rabid antisemitism, which you (unsurprisingly) also express here.
Quoting Nobeernolife
And now you write:
Quoting Nobeernolife
I rest my case.
What case?? I never said that Jews where never in history persecuted by others than nazis and muslims. That is a strawman.
That does not change the fact that nazi and islamic have a great affinity. As incidentally, many of co-religionists quite openly admit. Why do you think you find Mein Kampf on islamic websites like this? Because the islamists so much disagree with Nazism??
http://islam-radio.net//historia/hitler/mkampf/pdf/eng.pdf
You are saying that the Jews "might actually have been safer" with people whom you portray as being full of "hatred of Jews".
If that view is not contradictory, then I really don't know anymore what is.
You keep conveniently ignoring that the Holocaust took place in Europe, and that this genocidal, organized mass murder was an exponent of European ideology and European behaviour. As I mentioned earlier, in terms of Islamic morality, this kind of behaviour is despicable.
As far as I am concerned, you have simply failed in your attempt to shift the blame for what happened right in the centre of Europe onto the Middle East, which was not involved, and certainly not in charge, and which, on the contrary, had even made the effort to protect European Jews from earlier occurrences of horrific persecuting in Europe.
No, I did not talk about "people". I talked about the ideology, just like the Mufti of Jerusalem did.
Try to argue without misquoting people.
What do you think about Mein Kampf being published as reading material on islamic websites?
My question: does this factor in with Islamic law or is it wrong by Islamic law? Why is it wrong to give people charity but not right for a Western government to do this? Where is the line to be drawn among political systems, so that it is clear which bodies can take and give out money and which ones can't?
For a starters, an alim acting in the capacity of mufti is supposed to produce religious advisories that are syntactic entailments from scripture. None of what the Mufti of Jerusalem wrote, referred to scripture in any fashion, let alone, syntactically entailed from scripture.
Secondly, I even wonder why he was even called a mufti?
Quoting Wikipedia on Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
I personally always reject, out of hand, religious advisories originating from clergy appointed by or under control of secular authorities. That type of clergy can simply not be trusted for advice. Furthermore, I also always reject, out of hand, religious advisories originating from public figures, since they will obviously always be under pressure from secular authorities. Furthermore, the secular authority which bestowed this Islamic title onto Amin al-Husseini was not even Islamic.
Thirdly, sourcing religious advisories always requires a substantial effort in "mufti shopping". It is not because one mufti advises in one particular way that there would be consensus ("ijma") on his advisory amongst the religious scholars ("ulema").
Fourthly, Amin al-Husseini had been trained as an Ottoman administrator meant to join its bureaucracy, and not as a cleric:
Quoting Wikipedia on the educational background of Amin al-Husseini
In my impression, he was not even qualified to produce religious advisories. I do not endorse the use of the clerical designation 'mufti' for members of the secular bureaucracy:
Quoting Wikipedia on the term mufti
Therefore, even though I do not necessarily reject the soundness of his secular decisions or of his political leadership in Palestine, my opinion about Amin al-Husseini is that he was merely some kind of Ottoman bureaucrat with very weak reference to Islamic law and who was masquerading as a mufti without actually being one.
How could anyone that has no education and cannot read be expected to cite the works of hitler or any other nazi?
Quoting alcontali
I could never happen because not enough jews live in those places. But that does not mean that killing on a smaller scale has not happened.
Do not bother to reply, I don't want any more of your garbage directed at me.
In that case, do not address your own garbage to me. Capito? Furthermore, who the hell do you think you are that you can give orders to other users on this forum? You, arrogant loser!
GTFO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Wee_Small_Hours
So now you are bashing Al Al Husseini? I would agree he is worthy bashing (just as his friend Adolf Hitler is), but you are pretty alone in that assessment. Husseini is a well respected cleric and went on to be come teacher of Hassan Al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful and influential Sunni islamist organization today.
Well, I am glad you are distancing yourself from the Muslim Brotherhood, but you are also distancing yourself from islamic teaching then.
Really now? You do realize that Saudi Arabia and Gaza Strip are 100% free of Jews ("judenrein" as Hitler would have called it), and in all other Arab muslim countries, the few remaining Jews are living under discriminatory Dhimmi conditions. What was that again about "apartheid"?
Also, what does your "long list of legal clauses in the Qoran" say about the Armenian genocide, carried out by the Ottoman empire, which quite rivals the Nazi holocaust?
You do realize that the moon is the islamic symbol, meant to replace the cross, don`t you?
Youre being trolled dude.
Really? By who? It is hard to tell these days. I.e. when I turn on the TV and see the talking heads at CNN, I really can´t tell if I these people are serious or just have a great time trolling everyone.
Alcontali
Really? I dont think he is trolling. His response is pretty typical for what I get from muslim zealots.
Id bet ya if there was some way to tell...unless YOURE the troll! :brow:
My opinion on him is mixed. I agree with his anti-Zionist efforts but I do not agree with his Faustian pact with the Nazis. But then again, it is not as if the Zionists weren't good friends with the Gestapo and the SS either:
Quoting Wikipedia on the Zionist love affair with the Gestapo and the SS
Look at this here:
Quoting Wikipedia on the Haavara Agreement
The Zionists were more than happy to help the Nazis with solving their "Jewish problem". In what other ways, did they offer to help the Nazis, huh? So, the Zionists apparently went around Europe, travelling left and right, offering to help with solving other countries' "Jewish problem" ... with a view on creating a new one in Palestine.
Quoting Nobeernolife
I have not made any representations or comments about anybody named Hassan Al Banna or about the Muslim Brotherhood, which is an organization that can only be assessed on their own merits or lack thereof.
Where do you get that from? Any source for this truly bizarre idea?
After a long series of "reforms", and especially after the Young Turks had taken over power, the Ottoman empire had become a nationalist, secular state. The Sharif of Mecca started the Arab Revolt in 1916 exactly for that reason:
Quoting Wikipedia on the Arab Revolt
Large parts of the Middle East were already at war with the Ottoman empire when the Armenian genocide took place. The successor state to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, is also a nationalist, secular state, that is prone to ideological manipulations. The entire Kurdish conflict also started only after the Ottoman empire became a nationalist, secular state.
Ah, sorry I get now what you are referring to. Yes, the Gestapo and SS were originally ordered to facilitate Jewish deportation to the historical Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine, while the Mufti of Jerusame and muslim clerics in general preferred the mass murder of Jews, that is correct.
However, you get from that to deny that Nazism and Islam do not agree in their hatred of Jews is not clear from me. The writing and statements are quite clear.
I have posted two links for that.
Yes, I answered that now. I too would "cooperate" with someone who gives me the choice to either a) flee or b) be murdered. I do not think from that you can conclude I am friends with the thug who gives me the choice.
No, these European Jews were just supposed to stay in Europe. The Palestinians were not keen on their mass deportation to Palestine.
,,,,,and get murdered. Yep, very compassionate.
By the way, the term "Palestinian" simply means resident of Palestine. That includes Jews (the original inhabitants), Christians, Druzes, Muslims, and others. The Druzes, Christians and Jews have no problem with immigration of Jews, Only the Muslim Arabs have.
Your use of the term "Palestinians" to mean "muslim Arabs" is highly misleading.
Well no, that was a Nazi idea. That was not an idea that came from the Middle East. You are again trying to shift the blame for the Holocaust to others. The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans on Europeans because of European ideology.
What the heck is "European ideology"? Something you just made up?
As for the islamic view on the holocaust, the leading Sunni cleric confirms that it is Allas will:
"Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers."
(Yusuf al-Qaradawi)
Was Nazism then rather a Chinese ideology?
Quoting Nobeernolife
First of all, everything that happens in the universe is deemed to be Allah's will. Allah is considered to be Aristotle's first mover.
Of course, that does not mean that it is appropriate or even anywhere tasteful to gleefully designate a painful calamity as a "serves you right" event. The doctrine is meant to be used as a general guideline and not as an opportunity to make fun of someone who has just suffered a debilitating setback.
Quoting Natural disasters and calamities in light of Quran and Sunnah
You trying to change the topic. The holocaust was not as "natural disaster". It was carried out by Nazis and assisted by muslims. And in the eyes of the lead Sunni cleric, it was a good thing, and he hopes that Muslims will continue it: "Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers."
So what was that again about Nazism being incompatible with islam?
No, no. It was carried out by Nazis.
Quoting Nobeernolife
This cleric does not seem to be familiar with the details of the Holocaust. The Nazis also mass-murdered Jewish women and children. In spite of their ahl al-kitab status, the Nazis also mass-murdered Jewish noncombatant men. Someone needs to update this cleric on these matters, because the Quran strictly forbids Muslims to participate in that kind of things.
On the other hand, the Zionist apartheidsstate of Israel will always end up at the negotiation table; if they are reasonable, in order to sign the dissolution of their apartheidsstate and to discuss the details of the successor state, or if they are unreasonable, to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender. The choice of instrument is theirs, really.
Carried out by Nazis, applauded by muslims, and also assisted by muslims. Read up on the Nazi muslim SS troups that the Al Husseini recruited, i.e. in Yugoslavia.
And Yussuf Al-Qaradafi is not just "a" random cleric, he is the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood and massively influential in the (sunni) islamic world.
You keep evading and misleading, but I think I have made it abundantly clear why I find islam problematic
There is no Pope in Islam. A mufti's advisory only binds himself. What's more, I am quite sure that his views are not the consensus ("ijma") view on this matter. In fact, it is rather a matter of asking him if he really approves of forbidden behaviour. For example, ask him for a jurisprudential advisory about:
Quoting Sisak children's concentration camp
If he writes a religious advisory approving of Sisak children's concentration camp, then I will change my mind on this issue. For the time being, however, I just think that he does not know what he is talking about.
I did not say anything about a pope. Why do you keep misquoting me?
However, I am sure you know that various clerics in the islamic world carry various degrees of respect.
Al-Quaradafi has an enormous influence in Sunni islam, just like Al Sistani has in Shia islam.
If you did not know that, check it yourself.
And when Al-Quaradafi praises the Nazi holocaust and hopes that muslims will continue the good work of mass-murdering Jews, yes that DOES carry weight,
Now go on and try to change the topic again.
That was not a quote. Where do you see quotation marks?
Quoting Nobeernolife
No, no, no. As far as I am concerned, "who" exactly says something, does not matter, simply because that is the core principle of manipulation. All that matters, is that religious advisories entail syntactically from scripture. Therefore, only "how" he says it, can be of import.
I subdivide the world in two types of people:
I despise the epistemically inept. I view them with contempt only.
As I see it, there are no such religious scholars who "carry various degrees of respect". Only what they say, can "carry various degree of respect". If their advisory syntactically entails from scripture then I will carefully accept what they say. Otherwise, I won't.
You see, the epistemically inept learn to trust the voice and appearance of the newsreader on television. They pretty much automatically believe what he says.
My theory of deception says that it is the aggregate belief itself in the deceptive statement (i.e. that a=b) that fuels the growth in the total amount of deception ( (b-a)² ).
Hence, it is exactly because large numbers of epistemically-inept individuals believe that the newsreader on television is telling the truth, that he increasingly starts telling outrageous lies. If his audience were even only moderately skeptical, he would immediately start reining in his inclination to lie. In other words, it is his audience, i.e. the plebs, i.e. the populace of epistemically inept, who fuel most of the problems in the world. These people are truly despicable.
It's fascinating to me how differently we think. Every time I ask you a question, your answer(s) seem to go off in an entirely different direction than I was thinking. Not a criticism. just an observation. Anyway, there are many different ways of responding to you - so as an experiment? Rather than clump all the responses together, I'm going to try to split these out into different threads. There is a risk in this approach in that the different reads may get mixed up - there will be some overlap between them, but this is an experiment. :smile:
Thread #1 - Get a common set of rules
Quoting alcontali
Well no, we're not coming up with new rules, we're only coming up with commonalities. As you say:
Quoting alcontali
Here's a task that would be well suited to a person of your capabilities. Figure our how to map moral rules into the Coq Proof Assistant - start an open source project and allow people of all faiths to enter their moral rules into the database and look for intersections. So in the simplest situation, religion X may have moral rules {a, b, c, d} while religion Y has moral rules {d, e, f} - so there is a common moral rule "d".
Of course it's much more complicated than that. Religions A-Y could have a common rule q that you must do something but religion Z forbids it. Do we not allow q? Maybe religion Z only has a few thousand adherents so it's OK. You could build into your system criteria so individuals could widen or narrow the commonality.
An even more serious difficulty? How do we know if two rules from different religions are the same - seeing as they are likely worded differently? Not an easy question to answer - you might need some sort of voting capability built into the project.
If you could pull this off, it would be very cool.
Thread #2 - Rules are interpreted by human beings
And now I'm going to contradict my previous Thread #1. There's no point in trying to come up with a common set of moral rules - because people can and do interpret the same written rule to have different meanings. Take Islam. There is only one set of written rules, yet people have been fighting and killing each other for over a thousand years over the correct interpretation of those rules. Most recently we have seen a particular sect - ISIL - commit unspeakable acts of violence against innocent people.
I am not asking you to defend ISIL. I understand that you are justifiably very suspicious of hierarchies, but even if the different branches of Islam did not fight and kill each other, you cannot deny the fact that human beings are going to look at the same written moral rule and interpret it differently - which leads to different actions in the real world.
Just out of curiosity - and in an effort to understand you better - do you consider yourself Sunni, Shiite, other?
I don't really do denominations.
I am probably ghair-madhhabi.
It is also beyond me why Ali would be the "friend" of Allah, as the Shia profess. I would need to read a much better explanation for that, because for the time being, I just don't geddit ...
Thread #3
You have expressed very consistently the need for a formal set of rules that are inspired by a transcendental source outside the system itself.
Are you saying that there is nothing inherently wrong with killing your neighbor, raping his wife, and kidnapping his children? Are you saying that the only thing keeping you from performing such acts is the moral rules of your religion? I hope not. Can you acknowledge that you do not need a transcendental source to recognize that such actions are morally wrong?
Most generally, merely "a source outside the system itself". Once you say "transcendental", you are already outside the system itself. What does "transcendental" even mean within a formal system?
Quoting EricH
There is no system to explain this. You may instinctively sense that it is wrong to do any of that, but that is where the explanation actually stops. Again, what does "to instinctive sense" even mean within a formal system?
We are talking about systems for which we want to mechanically verify the justification for its theorems. A machine does not instinctively sense. If we go down that route, we will never be able to achieve that goal. In that case, such project will remain stuck in its starting block.
We are aware of a lot more than we can justify. It requires discipline not to make use of that awareness or even assume its existence when programming machines, because they simply do not have that awareness.
Quoting EricH
From within a formal system we know nothing about the reason why its basic rules are the way they are. If you want a computer to help you verifying the justification of a religious advisory, you cannot use any of that. You will have to stick to mechanical symbol manipulation only.
Well, if you want to base your argument not on any statements by clerics but solely on the literal contents of the Koran, you end up with systems like Afghanistan under the Taliban and Syria under ISIS control. That is where literal, full-bore, 100% Koranic scripture is realized.
If that is what you want.... oh, and by they way, those place are also 100% cleansed of Jews, of course.
If I am on a bus, and I stand to stretch for a moment and somebody sneaks in to steal my seat, I would say "I was there first". I have therefore appealed to a law or rule. Islam will have to demonstrate that their system truly clarifies moral issues and gives us more motivation to follow them. I've been studying various religions and so far Catholicism has the best pedigree, except that there are issues like the sedevacantist one and the impossibility of determining if any official decrees in history have truly met the standard of infallibility. So the weaknesses of all the "systems" are showing themselves to me.
I get the idea that Muslims don't get the "moral of the story" when it comes to Nietzsche's writings, and that they have experienced a Sartre moment where "people are hell". People find different things to distract themselves in those situations. Duke Ellington said the best thing in life was food!
Finally, how are we to conceptualize a God who sustains nature every moment of it's existence, yet positively wills some things and not others?
So don't be scared of atheists killing people because they didn't find meaning in their lives (that would be their fault).
Islam does very clearly classify moral issues and does give motivation to follow (brutal punishment on on one side and 72 virgins on the other....). However, the islamic moral system is not one that correponds to modern, enlightened, compassionate ethics.
Order killings? Are you sure of that? Afaics, Christianity includes the concept of sanctity of life. Islam, in contrast, does not.
Well the old Testament has the Jews killing pregnant women by tearing out the fetus. God commanded. Christians try to cover themselves by saying Jesus changed this in the New Covenant, but it is not in the New Testament
Ah, the Old Testament. But those are old Jewish stories preceding Christianity by 3000 years or so, so I never understood how that is part of "Christianity".
But I concede the point. If you want to bash the Old Testament, go ahead. I understand it is full of blood and gore.
That is not how it works either.
I base my argument in religious law solely on statements that syntactically entail from scripture (Quran+Sunnah).
These statements tend to be provided by religious scholars. In theory, everybody could provide them, but in practice the provider will, more often than not, need rigorous training in religious law as well as experience in order to discover such statements. Hence, religious scholars play an important role, but not exactly the role you think.
In other words, you have presented a false dichotomy, based on a poor and even incorrect understanding of the epistemology of religious law, and of even epistemology in general.
It would amount to saying: "In set theory (ZFC) you can base your argument on what mathematicians say or solely on the literal contents of Zermelo and Fränckel's publications on the matter." That would be your false dichotomy applied to mathematics.
It reflects your completely false belief that as soon as someone gets a degree in mathematics, he can say whatever he likes about it, because his expert opinion would be sufficient to back any of his claims in mathematics. It may work like that in the liberal arts, but it does not work like that in any serious STEM field. It also does not work like that in religious law.
It is quiet clear to me that there is a gigantic misunderstanding of the ten commandments by the majority of people that do things that are bad.
We really do need an expert to explain them.
No,no, no. What am I saying, how can I be so blind.
They are written down so that everyone can read them. Why would they need to be any interpretation? Is god not wise enough to give them in clearly understandable words so that his people can understand and obey them?
Do not kill!
Does anyone need help understanding that?
The only reason I can think of that could explain the need for specialist to explain the rules is that the people do not have an education and need some one to help. NOT interpret them nor help understand their true meaning as it is written.
But are we out of the middle ages now? There are supposed to be few illiterate people left so the need for people to have holy books read to them should have and appears to have diminished. At least in some parts of the world.
Another thing that I could never understand is why people that have been promised a trip to heaven and a lot of presents when they get there would want to live outside their beloved countries and go to places where they hate the people there because of the god they worship.
Religious ideology is not a "serious STEM field". It is mass psychology, and the masses of islamist fanatics out there in the real world do not know or care about your sophistry.
Christians have managed to extract an enlightened, positive ethical system out their befuddled books. As is evidenced in the real world, by the progress of christian-based societies. I think you should leave well-enough alone.
You should not generalize about "religion". There are very different ones out there.
I talk about religious law. Religion has other areas than just its law, for example, the origin of religious law.
Religious law is a formal system of morality that rests on system-wide premises, i.e. its scriptures. From these system-wide premises, we can syntactically derive theorems. It is possible to mechanically verify these syntactic entailments.
This is an example of a theorem encoded in the formal language of the Coq proof assistant:
I am very interested in doing a project that consists in encoding the scriptural system-wide premises of Islamic law in the formal language of the Coq proof assistant.
Next, it should be possible to also encode the curated knowledge database of religious advisories. At that point, the curated knowledge database of religious advisory scripts will be mechanically verifiable.
That will create the field of religious script programming, i.e. the activity of re-encoding religious advisories supplied in natural-language into the formal language of the Coq proof assistant with a view on carrying out mechanical verification.
That will then be complete evidence for the fact that religious law is a STEM field.
In fact, we knew this already because all systems of formal reasoning from first principles, i.e. all axiomatic disciplines, are fundamentally STEM fields.
Islamic scriptures are a wildly incoherent collection of oral transmissions. The only system-wide premise that you will find is "good is what is good for islam". So not sure what you want to enter in your model.
You know absolutely nothing about the Islamic scriptures.
You think you know, but you don't.
Welcome to the Dunning-Kruger effect running loose again:
Quoting Wikipedia on the Dunning-Kruger effect
What you have said, is again a prominent example of liberal-arts ignorance and arrogance. Those degrees are worthless, simply because that way of thinking is worthless.
Quoting Wikipedia on transgenders in Islam
The Shia position on the matter is currently much more accepting of transgenderism than the Sunni one, where there is currently no clear "ijma" (consensus) and where legal opinions are much more divided. But then again, I am not a religious scholar and I am not the right person to ask for a religious advisory on the matter.
Actually, I have read them all, plus plenty of interpretations by leading clerics (which you admitted to being completely ignorant of).
Quoting Wikipedia on the Ulema
You have not duly trained as an alim and therefore you are not a member of the ulema. You have no credibility whatsoever in the field of interpreting or applying the Islamic scriptures. Again, you are clearly ignorant and incompetent on the subject, and your views are also annoyingly arrogant.
No, just like a doctor, an alim is not necessarily an "I'm better" aristocrat.
The job of a doctor is typically to figure out from your flailing story about "feeling unwell, having pain here and there" what exactly is going on, if figuring that out, is uberhaupt possible.
So, the doctor proceeds with his "theorem discovery" activity by for example commissioning a stool lab test for the presence of H. pylori bacteria, from which he can then justify his opinion that this infection is the reason for your stomach ache.
His belief is justified from the paperwork produced by the laboratory.
You do not need to believe what he says, merely because he is a doctor.
That would be the wrong approach.
No, you may believe what he says, because his opinion is backed by justifying paperwork.
The fact that he is a doctor dramatically increases the likelihood that he will correctly translate your flailing story into an opinion that can be backed by justifying paperwork. That is why you chose to ask him and not, for example, an electrician, for a medical opinion.
As long as a practitioner, who specializes in a particular field, can produce justifying paperwork for his conclusion -- preferably mechanically verifiable paperwork -- it makes sense for customers to ask such specialized practitioner for his opinion.
It is all based on the idea that the discovery of the solution is harder than verifying that such purported solution truly is the solution. It all goes back to the "P vs NP Problem":
Quoting Third millenium prize. One-million dollar prize for a proof why it seems to be like that.
....and every time I have quoted an islamic scholar, you said you don´t know them and anyway in islam there is no scholarly authority.
Go figure.
Where do you get the "workaholics" from??
You have a very poor epistemic understanding of what the term "knowledge" means. That is the source of your confusion. The underlying reason for that is that your stint in the liberal arts has totally confused you about what this term is all about. There is technically no knowledge in the liberal arts, because none of its beliefs can be justified.
So, let me repeat all over again.
We use specialized practitioners to discover a solution in a particular field. We only know that their solution truly is the solution because the justifying paperwork that they supply is verifiable. So, we verify the justification, preferably, even mechanically.
Hence, while it is the specialist's job to discover a solution and produce justifying paperwork for it, it is the user's own responsibility to verify that paperwork.
If the user fails to verify the justifying paperwork, then this user is just an idiot, who is asking to be manipulated and deceived. In other words, if you blindly trust a specialized practitioner, you are better off not even using his services, because in that case, you have no "purchasing ability".
For example, not everybody can commission repair work on a nuclear plant. The corporate purchasing or sourcing officer who places the order for the repair work does not need to be able to carry out the repairs by himself, but he will still need to be able to verify the proposals made by specialized contractors, and choose the best solution, as well as verifying the delivery of the repairs.
In other words, the ability to buy specialized services also requires some knowledge; not necessarily the knowledge to produce these services, but certainly the knowledge to pick the right service provider and to verify his delivery.
Seriously, your lack of common sense is astonishing.
I do not know what you are waffling about about, and I suspect neither are you. I pointed out a numer of facts about islam, which you first denied and then declared you did not know. I pointed islamic scholars which first did not know and then declared are irrelevant. You accused me of not knowing islamic scripture and I pointed out I indeed read it. Then you declared only islamic scholare are are able to interpret islamic scriptures (something that you denied earlier).
You know nothing about me personally, yet you claimed I am Jewish (which I am not) or that I study liberal arts (which I do not). Now you are waffling about nuclear power plants.
Let is just say that II sure as hell would not want to rely on a nuclear power plant designed by someone with your, err, logical thinking abolity.
I was just saying that you do not seem to have any understanding of epistemology.
Quoting Nobeernolife
You misunderstand the term "to know". Remembering trivia from skimming through long bouts of text has nothing to do with the epistemic meaning of the verb "to know". Again, you "know" nothing about Islamic scriptures, if only, because you do not even understand the epistemic meaning of the term "to know", let alone, what the religion of Islam is all about.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Read up on the very, very basics of epistemology.
You do not seem to be capable of distinguishing between the act of discovering new knowledge and verifying that this new knowledge is indeed knowledge. I have even pointed out to you the "P vs NP" question, but you do not seem to understand it ... at all.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Too late.
I have been involved in a project in which I wrote software for the quality control of nuclear fuel rods. I have also been involved in a project writing software related to the revision and scheduling of repairs on a steam cracker.
If any of these industrial installations fall apart, it is too late to annoy me with that matter, because in the meanwhile I moved on to lots of other gigs until finally cashing out from my last startup.
Of course, I could ask you how much you have been able to invoice your customers for your logical thinking ability, but I won't, because I am not as arrogant as you are. Still, have you ever been paid even once for your logical thinking ability?
Of course, in liberal arts courses sometimes they read Averroes and Avicenna, and usually the Aristotle those two loved. So in attacking liberal arts you are attacking Islamic philosophical traditions. Is this because you suck at philosophy? After all, you can't even prove there is a God? You tried, you failed. Your only argument was "infinite regress is impossible", which I refute above in this thread
As modern science get's more nominalistic, it breaks the spine of Islamic law, which can't handle all the questions that arise in our age. Even the religion with the stronger pedigree, Catholicism, will bow before science, as it's infallible authority (the Pope, or the Pope with all the bishops together collegially) realizes it has no tools from the Bible and Tradition to handle these issues which confuse them on natural law. I predict Rome will keep issuing weak ass "ordinary Magisterial" (fallible) decrees with general guidance. I prophecy that Islamic scholars will keep thinking they are the wisest in their consensuses, but will feel sorrow as their world is left behind
You are not a very prophet. Islam growing massively, and not because of some intellectual success, but because of the combination of demographics and Western political corretness.
Proving God from what axioms?
I am not interested in any of that.
I am only interested in religious law as a formal system.
I find the most interesting project in this realm to be the mechanical verification of the syntactic entailments from scripture that justify religious advisories. What proof assistant would be the most suitable: Coq or Isabelle? My intuition says that Coq is the way to go, but I am certainly open to suggestions.
Anything to say about Coq versus Isabelle?
If you want to discuss bullshit, however, you will have to do that with someone else.
Quoting Gregory
STEM has universal appeal. You will find Chinese, Brazilian, Pakistani, and Namibian engineers working together on a common project. Muslims have no problems whatsoever with STEM fields. Your liberal-arts nonsense, however, is widely despised outside the West. As matter of fact, it is also widely despised within the West.
Really?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16258-how-to-stop-creationism-gaining-a-hold-in-islam/
Quoting Nobeernolife
STEM is not about dealing with useless verbiage.
The core question is : What can you do with evolution theory? What applications? Where is the money? Where are the markets?
Show me one product, service, or technology in general that depends on evolution theory. Furthermore, in a falsificationist sense, show me even just one experimental test to be carried out in a laboratory in which we would be able to successfully evolve one species out of another.
Just one example country, Pakistan, to give you an indication of the interest in STEM fields amongst Muslims:
Quoting List of engineering universities in Pakistan
Again, you simply don't know what you are talking about.
Worse, in line with the Dunning-Kruger effect, you do not even know that you do not know. That leads you to believe that you know it all, while in reality, you know fuck all.
Red Delicious Apples
Dalmatians
Scottish Fold kittens
modern wheat
Lettuce
Cold Hardy Kiwi plants
etc. etc. etc.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution
There is still a very serious difference between:
Quoting Producing dog breeds as an example of natural selection
versus:
Quoting Wikipedia on Evolution
Quoting Wikipedia on LUCA
Producing different dog breeds is not exactly the same as producing a dog out of a single-celled organism.
Quoting Wikipedia on speciation
Quoting Wikpedia on laboratory speciation
Hence, it is obvious that, in terms of falsificationism, something like the LUCA theory cannot be backed by laboratory experiments. Furthermore, it looks like no speciation at all can be carried out in a laboratory. This does not necessarily mean that the LUCA theory, which clearly depends on speciation, would be wrong, but as far as I am concerned, it is merely a hypothesis.
It's a theory, actually.
So you accept Western psychological studies only when they suit you? And why are you asking for help to formalize your system on here? And did you know most biological fields use knowledge of huge gene mutation, and other mutations, over time as a premise?
Faith is believing in something without evidence. You believe in your religion despite the evidence. No religion on earth clearly has God's spirit. It's just stories in your head and you are arrogant to say otherwise. It's deep down just "will to power", yet you hate Nietzsche! There is such a thing as maliciousness, and it's opposite. People who kill over homo sex are the former. The system you want help with is one where gay people get the death penalty. Again, you're a moron.
And that I think should be recognized as the only miracle in the whole of christianity.
Quoting Nobeernolife
Christian-based societies that would not accept that the earth was not the center of the universe.
Christian-based societies that burned witches.
Christian-based societies that chased fellow christians out of their countries and forced them to go to invade the new world.
Christian-based societies that refuse to allow birth control even though the world is overflowing and the people in many places are a burden upon the society instead of the church.
Christian-based societies that made fortunes by stealing the gold from the countries they invaded.
Christian-based societies that for many years backed the use of slaves, bonded servants and even the sale of babies from the work houses poor and the orphanages.
And so on and so on etc ad infinitum.
Exactly what part of society's development did the religion have? Did their scientist create anything to improve the world? Personally I can not think of one single advance that can actually be credited to the church.
Quoting Nobeernolife
The only thing I can sympathize with there is your handle, cool. :cool:
Quoting Wikipedia on the Dunning-Kruger tests
It looks nicely falsifiable. In my impression, it looks like genuine science. Any reason why it would not be?
Quoting Gregory
I only mention it when it is relevant to the conversation and because I like the idea. I guess that at some point I will run into people who will also be interested in the project. In fact, I have done projects in the past that started like that, through sheer serendipity, and which even made me a ton of money. Especially business opportunities tend to be very serendipitous. It's all about stumbling upon the possibility to do things with real upside potential.
You never seem to mention interesting projects that you would want to do? You seem to have a different mentality altogether; and not a particularly entrepreneurial one, I guess. Maybe you are rather a wage slave who continuously lives in fear because he only ever faces the downside potential of getting fired by his dictatorial boss? In that case you will indeed need to anxiously hang on to the little you have ...
Quoting Gregory
What evidence? In your liberal-arts bullshit world, there is no evidence of anything. There are only word salads aimed at manipulating even bigger idiots.
Quoting Gregory
As a "liberal artist", the only fake skill that you have, and that you are known for, is talking shit about other people. Your social class of individuals is rightfully viewed with contempt only.
Pakistan has a population of 200 million; of course there are universities.
Talking about this mythical elevated interest in STEM fields, can you tell us how many Nobel prizes in STEM fields have been one by muslims?
What exactly about being able to change the attributes of species from generation to generation (as we do when creating new apples) is not convincing to you?
I should be used to it by now, but I continue to be dismayed at the level of personal invective in these conversations. There are no stupid people out here. Please criticize the ideas, not the person
And one of them is Ahmediyya, a sect which is recognized by either Sunni or Shia as "muslim".
Yep, obviously a trememdous love for STEMM in those pious societies!
Hey, hold the horses! What "personal invective" am I guilty of? Not been calling anybody names here, afaik. I am not into that. If you want say I am guilty of un-PC wrongthink, then yes I plead guilty.
Charles Darwin asked the following questions about his own theory in "Difficulties of the Theory":
Quoting Wikipedia on speciation
Evolving modified apples out of the original apples seems indeed perfectly possible. I have no problem with the idea that this can be done "by insensibly fine gradations" and we can indeed observe "innumerable transitional forms". Evolving an apple out of a primeval fish seems to be another problem altogether. Darwin's troublesome questions have actually never been answered conclusively, even though new speculations are of course always available. It is obvious that without man-made speciation, the "Difficulties of the Theory" cannot be addressed. In the end, it is about problems likely to be encountered when reverse engineering non-human technology. There is absolutely no guarantee that it will ever be fully understood. I've got nothing against speculative and tentative hypotheses, but I do not see that as anything else than that.
Why is evolving an apple out of a fish the kind of proof you need? When clearly it would just take too long and too many resources to do? I mean, you'd be dead before the experiments were concluded.
It's kind of like demanding scientists create a whole new planet with functioning gravity before you accept the reality of gravity.
I mean... do you have some better, more evidence-based explanation?
Well, no, I just thought that @Artemis objection was more interesting than your disconnected remark about (Barrack Obama's and Aung San Suu Kyi's ridiculous) Nobel prizes. I only have 17 fingers on both my hands, and I was already typing away with them.
Concerning Nobel prizes, I tend to generally agree with what Nassim Taleb says about them:
Quoting Wikipedia: Nassim Taleb's biography
Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman is also being mercilessly vilified in the bitcoin community for making utmost inept remarks about bitcoin. I also consider him to be totally clueless on the subject.
Quoting Investopedia.com on Paul Krugman
I use bitcoin every day.
I have done good and profitable software engineering projects with it.
If Krugman believes that nobody really understands bitcoin, how comes that the bitcoin software reference implementation works like a charm? Do you hear people complaining about it? I don't. Furthermore, it is just standard C++. A 30-year old programming language. Nothing fancy at all.
How comes that someone like Krugman calls things that he does not understand "some fancy technological thing" and that he swears that "nobody understands it". Has anybody ever written software of that size and magnitude without understanding what it is?
So, there is no point in glorifying Nobel prize laureates to me, because I share Nassim Taleb's opinion on Myron Scholes, and I am also convinced that Paul Krugman is totally clueless on the subject of bitcoin. By extension, that Nobel prize means absolutely nothing to me. I do not even want to mention Barrack Obama's and Aung San Suu Kyi's Nobel prizes, because that would lead me to making vitriolic remarks.
I consider the Nobel Prize to be mostly some kind of back patting ceremony between the cultural Marxists in Sweden and Norway and some other questionable libtard figures.
Furthermore, there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, which is the field in which I am much more interested, rather than the field of Obama's and Aung's fake "peace" prizes or the congratulations for Scholes' and Krugman's Mickey Mouse economics. It is the Fields medal that is the most prestigious prize for achievements in mathematics. And no, I don't know the religion of the recipients of the Fields medal. I don't keep track of that.
Well, that just means that it cannot be done. That does not mean in any fashion, however, that it is not necessary.
Quoting Artemis
The impossibility to do that, does limit scientists' understanding of gravity.
The fact that gravity cannot be generated artificially in a laboratory, is a problem in many, many ways.
It does not mean that gravity does not exist, but it certainly means that there are serious problems with the understanding of its true nature:
Quoting Wikipedia on the physical ToE
As I mentioned in an earlier remark, reverse engineering non-human technologies turns out to be, more often than not, a non-trivial problem. If it were possible to artificially generate gravity, my intuition says that the incompatibility between GR and QFT would soon be resolved.
You haven't explained why it would be necessary though.
Neither have you given me a good or better, evidence-based alternative theory.
I actually did.
Does that non-human technology even support speciation? The only way to provide evidence for such claim consists in triggering such speciation artificially. Otherwise, it is still very possible that this non-human technology does not support speciation at all.
The only way to demonstrate that a device can cut wood, is to actually cut wood with it.
Quoting Artemis
I haven't given an alternative theory for the incompatible GR + QFT combo either. That does not mean that it would now suddenly be compatible.
But you're not demanding that something just cut wood. Because the examples I gave do that. You're demanding it down the whole dang tree into matchsticks :joke:
A working theory can't just be usurped because you're dissatisfied with some very minor evidenciary gaps. You need to find an alternative better theory and/or actually disprove the original theory.
Well, concerning "very minor evidenciary gaps", I do not think that the speciation problem would be minor. The problems that Darwin mentioned in Chapter 6 of his book, "Difficulties of the Theory", are not minor either.
In one way, it does not really matter, because without the possibility to engage in artificial speciation, there are also no human technologies possible based on that principle. Hence, we cannot engineer anything based on that hypothesis, which means that it has no applications. What is even the value of a theoretical idea that cannot possibly have applications somewhere in a downstream discipline? Seriously, if we could make money from any of this, then nobody would be complaining about it, but just be making money with it instead.
Therefore, I consider the whole idea to be futile. If I were professionally active in biomolecular engineering or a similar field, I would just work with what really works, and for the time being just forget about artificial speciation and the LUCA hypothesis, because there is just no money in it! ;-)
Well, I disagree fundamentally with the idea that any idea has to have monetary benefits to be worthwhile. Knowledge is an end in itself.
But apart from that, it does have monetary benefits. And I listed several products we use all the time because we harnessed evolution in the form of selective breeding. In fact, civilization as we know it couldn't exist without humans having harnessed evolution in that way. We continue to use that and deeper understanding of evolution to combat diseases, improve overall human health, find ways to solve food resource problems, and create luxury food goods.
Speciation is not a huge, insurmountable problem for the theory of evolution, as much as it seems to be a minor hole exploited by those who grasp at straws to dismiss something that's otherwise pretty airtight.
Well, we will have to agree to disagree. Knowledge without any possible application, ever, not even in a deep downstream domain, is in my opinion ultimately worthless.
In fact, in that case, it is most likely not even knowledge.
Concerning the LUCA and speciation hypothesis, its justification simply fails the falsificationist requirement. Hence, it is epistemically not even knowledge. You wrote that you find that a minor problem, while I think that this epistemic problem is essential.
Quoting Artemis
Unfortunately, that is not what the problem is about. The LUCA and speciation hypothesis is not about selective breeding. Speciation and selective breeding are simply not the same things.
Quoting Artemis
If it is not a huge, insurmountable problem, then why don't they just carry out the artificial speciation? This whole idea that man-made speciation would be unimportant or just a minor problem to the LUCA hypothesis really sounds like sour grapes.
Where exactly is the difference except for degree of change?
Once you realize that there are only so many traits that differentiate one species from another, and that you can change those traits through breeding, and you've done the experiment to change one or more of those traits..... Well, back to your wood cutting analogy, I don't need to chop down the whole forest to know what tools could chop it all down. One tree is enough.
Quoting alcontali
Because it would take a really really long time and lots of resources and it's not necessary, because we have both identified the mechanisms by which it works and replicated them on small scales that prove them.
Evolution has such a preponderance of evidence on its side, that really the burden of disproof is on you. And that burden goes beyond merely waving at speciation in experimental settings.
That remark sounds like word-salad rhetoric from someone from the liberal arts.
Quoting How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’
It is not about "preponderance of evidence" or any "burden of disproof". I really do not care if you repeat all of that 100 times or more. It is about experimentally testing the LUCA and speciation hypothesis, which has not been done, because that is currently not possible.
Quoting Wikipedia on the scientific method
I never said anything about Barrack Obamas and Aung San Kyuis ridiculous Nobel prizes. What are you talking about? Please try to do without misquotes and strawmen.
OK, but please try to do in future without making false attribution, like "alcontali" is so fond of. It really makes communication impossible.
Annnnd with that weird remark we've come to the point of no return for the conversation :roll:
:wink: Phew!
Quoting alcontali
I am trying to express myself - as much as possible - within your framework. Here is what you said a while back:
Quoting alcontali
I take this to mean that there are axioms outside the formal system of Islamic Law upon which the laws are based - and that these axioms come from Allah. Am I getting this correct - or am I at least close?
BTW - in your response it's not necessary to cite any scripture - I'm a plain language person - I trust that your explanations are correct. :smile:
Maybe Allah doesn't want us to look for signs, since he doesn't a priori let us know what signs to look for. A great civilization might look great, but as with the "who is smart" question you bring up, intelligence has much to do with how happy you make yourself and others. There is a lot of factors that go into smartness. Just because Islam has the track record of generation after generation keeping the Koran pure, that doesn't mean it's the right religion. Rome so far hasn't proven it doesn't have infallible authority all these years, which could happen by dogmatic contradictions. If you were one who is open to actual miracle claims as proof of divine favor, Christianity has a pretty good case, and Catholicism too after you become a general Christian
Yes, I guess that this is probably quite correct.
It is a bit a similar situation to what you see in mathematics.
There is no justification whatsoever for the axioms of number theory or set theory from within these theories. However, you will still find serious attempts at justification from within the philosophy of mathematics for its ontology.
These ontological considerations are never considered part of mathematics proper. They are not even considered part of metamathematics (which intriguingly, is part of mathematics proper).
The relationship between religious law (formal system) and the transcendental areas in religion (informal views) is the same as between mathematics (formal system) and the ontological philosophy of mathematics (informal views).
It rejoins the general case that at the highest level of understanding there are no formal systems and there are no formal justifications.
Quoting Fitrah in the ontology of Islam
Quoting Intuitionism in the ontology of mathematics
Still, "the origins of X" debate can easily confuse the matter. That is why I try to avoid it. There is not one, single opinion at that level of understanding.
I simply prefer to work with the formal systems themselves. I am particularly attracted to the mechanical verification of theorems within these formal systems by using the Coq proof assistant.
The problem with mythology comes with interpreting it concretely instead of abstractly.
Quoting alcontali
Belated response here. I think I'm following this - Fitrah is an axiom.
So next question. How do we go from this axiom all the way to the numerous laws that regulate our behavior to one another? I understand how this works in math. How does it work in Islam? E.g., how does Islam derive the laws governing marital relations from Fitrah? Are there extra axioms and/or steps involved?
No, it is a philosophical explanation for why we adopt axioms. It is not an axiom itself.
If there is a more comprehensive list available - again with plain language explanations if available - you can give me a link to check out.
In mathematics it is relatively easy to find the basic rules of a theory structured as axioms. The following are the dominant axiomatizations in mathematics:
There are many more. The following is the dominant axiomatization of logic:
The axiomatization of logic gives the basic rules for the standard formal language used by the other mathematical axiomatizations (There are other formal languages possible). Hence the quite special status of logic in mathematics and in other axiomatic disciplines. The standard formal language in mathematics is first-order logic.
You can find lots of examples of various axioms in these three standard axiomatizations. Simple example of an axiom:
5 + 3 = 3 + 5
You can swap the order of operands in a sum. Generally:
a + b = b + a, for any a,b being a natural number.
Standard number theory will define what the term "natural number" means, up to final interpretation by an actual natural-number model. A model is also called: an interpretation, a universe, or a world.
The standard model of natural numbers is a regular language such as for example:
[math]\Bbb{N}[/math] = 0 | [1-9] [0-9] *
along with the symbols (+, x).
You can pick any number of arbitrary, distinct symbols [math](?_0, ..., ?_n)[/math], two or more, in order to define a collection of strings that represent the natural numbers:
[math]\Bbb{N}[/math] = [math]?_0[/math] | [ [math]?_1[/math]-[math]?_n[/math] ] [ [math]?_1[/math]-[math]?_n[/math] ] *
along with two arbitrary, distinct symbols (?,?), that will satisfy the standard theory of natural numbers (PA).
If you get used to the terminology, it can be relatively easy to learn to think in terms of axioms. Outside mathematics, axiomatic systems are also possible but have never been seriously formalized. So, their nature may be clearly axiomatic but they do not use symbolic language to express themselves.
Every verse in the Quran.
(https://quran.com)
I may be misunderstanding you (or there may simply be gaps in my knowledge of Islam), but from where I'm sitting there seems to be a contradiction in your writing.
Here's what you said in a response to @Nobeernolife:
Quoting alcontali
However, in your last reply to me, you stated that the Quran - and presumably all the laws therein - consists only of axioms. I think you would agree with me that a list of axioms does not constitute a formal system.
Are there an additional set of laws in Islam that are derived from the Quran? Perhaps analogous to the Talmud?
No, it does.
A formal system is a list of axioms.
Such formal system is always augmented with a choice of logic system, which is by default first-order logic.
Quoting Wikipedia on the term formal system
Since the choice of logic is pretty much always the same, it is often not even mentioned.
Quoting Wikipedia on axiomatic system
In Islam, the Quran is a set of axioms while religious law ("al fiqh") is the (axiomatic) theory that emerges from the Quran. The Sunnah is considered to be already a set of theorems derived from the Quran and its use is therefore limited to a clarifying role.
A pretty strange axiomic system seeing how many times it contradicts itself (check the difference between Meccanic and Medinaic verses). Go on alcantali!
The difference between you and me, is that I know that I have no specialized knowledge in this area, while you are clearly too arrogant to understand your own limitations. I am also not going to try to find and invite a religious scholar to clarify such details and point out what documentation to peruse because you are not polite enough either. It is just going to embarrass everyone involved, except for you, because you could obviously never feel embarrassed.
I actually see alot of similarities between the way the Koran was written and the book of Mormon. It almost appears they have the same author. However for various reasons i do see most Mormons as actual christians.
Quoting alcontali
I could quibble with you over the definition of a formal system. Is a list of axioms by itself without a mechanism to generate theorems a formal system? I'm not qualified to answer that question, but if I had to maker a guess I'd say no.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to attempt to work within your definitional framework. Let me echo back in my own words what I think you are saying:
1) The Quran contains the axioms of Islam. These are transcendental in origin (your words) and not subject to question or dispute.
2) The Sunnah contains the theorems. These theorems are derived from the Quran, but they also rely on the Hadith for supporting evidence.
3) Finally, there is Fiqh which - quoting WIkipedia - "is human understanding of the divine Islamic law as revealed in the Quran and the Sunnah". So this is sort of the day to day interpretation of the Sunnah when the need arises to handle situations that cannot be easily decided by the Quran or the Sunnah.
There are multiple versions of both the Hadith & Sunnah and different denominations of Islam use certain versions and not others. Regarding the Fiqh (and again according the Wikipedia) there are "four prominent schools (madh'hab) of fiqh within Sunni practice, plus two (or three) within Shi'a practice."
I know you are deeply suspicious of organized schools of thought (since they typically become politicized) and consider yourself to be ghair-madhhabi - so no need to re-state that :smile: .
At this point in the conversation I just need to know if my understanding is reasonably close for an outside observer.
The mechanism to generate theorems from axioms is the system of logic:
Quoting EricH
Hadith and Sunnah are often used as synonyms for each other.
I have looked it up in Quora, but apparently that view is considered not to be completely correct.
Hadith are testimonies about the prophet's life in which he applies the Quran. So, the Hadith are mostly theorems. The Sunnah, however, are practices transmitted from Mosaic Judaism mentioned in the Hadith. Therefore, part of the Sunnah are also considered to be axioms.
Quoting Difference between Hadith and Sunna
But then again, the Quran mentions all axioms already, even when they were transmitted from Mosaic Judaism:
Quoting Difference between Hadith and Sunna
That is how we arrive at the simplifying view that the Quran are the axioms while (some of) the Hadith are clarifying, derived rules as applied to practical situations, i.e. theorems.
OK. We are saying that in some sense Islamic law is a formal system. However, I think you would agree that it is not a formal system in the same sense as in math. I did a quick search and pulled out this from a different thread:
Quoting alcontali
This seems accurate to me. So when we say that Islamic law is a formal system it seems to me that we are making an analogy: Islamic law mirrors some /many of the attributes/behavior/qualities of a formal system. Your thoughts?
Wow, are we in favor of robots ruling because they would be pure reason without sensory input? If we are judging religions, I think it is very important to value sensory input. Not to do that would so be as cold as the extermination of Jews. Simply a practical decision. "This year bad weather destroyed the crops so we need to kill 5000 people so those who remain will have enough food and stay healthy".
It is possible to verify syllogisms from their premises, i.e. axioms, by using a tool like the Coq proof assistant:
This approach requires encoding the Quran, as system-wide premises, in the formal language of Coq. It is an inordinate amount of work, but it should allow to operate a Quranic formal system for the mechanical verification of (a subset of) the existing knowledge database of religious advisories. Curating that enormous knowledge database is another massive task. In fact, for mathematics proper, this curation and encoding work has been completed only very partially. With enough budget, however, I feel that it could also be done for Islamic law and yield very interesting results.
When you look at logic sentence such as:
You can see that the conclusion is a syntactic entailment of its premises. The symbols actually themselves do not matter. It would also work perfectly-well like this:
In the end, the reason why this syllogism entails is entirely structuralist:
Quoting Wikipedia on mathematical structuralism
That is because the symbols are "alpha-equivalent":
Quoting Wikipedia on alpha equivalence (lambda calculus)
So, yes, actual semantic content does not matter in the context of syntactic entailment.
However, a system with large numbers of sentences written in the second, nondescript manner would be much harder to debug. Software is not just written for only the machine to read. It must also be suitable for other people to read, so that it can be troubleshooted and maintained.
Therefore, both a religious script representing a religious advisory as well as the Quranic base library are just like other software. On the one side, they are purely structuralist, but on the other side, they are also meant to communicate to other religious programmers what the otherwise alpha-equivalent symbols are all about.
Okay. My daughter says I am bipolar and that could be. But a bipolar god? I was joking when I suggested God is bipolar.
I am listening to a show now that is attempting to answer what math is. Is math just in our minds or does it exist like Plato's forms?
It is not normal for very young children to comprehend math. While parents mean well to push their children to learn, they lack knowledge of the development of the brain, and lack knowledge of how to teach, and unfortunately have unrealistic expectations. I think this hurts children.
I think if we look at what science has done to our understanding of religion, we would realize, religion today is nothing as it was before the modern age.
God was more a fearsome and punishing God than a loving God, before our bellies were full, most children lived to adulthood, and our life expectancy doubled. It was science that over came the evils and that is what leads to us worship a loving God instead of fear and punishing God.
It's interesting how his personality seems to change over time. He was a being that killed first born sons and flooded the world. Now he's helping people win football games.
Interestingly, the Pythagoreans used to believe the Earth was the centre of the Universe, but had to modify their beliefs in order to get it in sync with their mathematical demands. It is remarkably similar, although imperfectly, to Copernicus' view that came much, much later.
"Pythagorean musical and mathematical conceptions found their highest expression in the cosmological doctrine of the Music of the spheres. When Pythagoras declared that there is a universal harmony, a grand musical pattern, in the movements of the Universe, he was expressing, in his own style of concrete imagining, the conviction that rational law governs the universe. For to the Pythagorean mind, it must be remembered, music was identical with number, and number in turn was conceived geometrically. Consequently, since the circle and its perfection and simplicity made the strongest appeal to the unsophisticated mathematical sensibilities of the Greeks, the meaning of astronomical law became naturally affixed to it. There was no serious trouble conceiving the observed movements of the Sun, Moon and fix stars as basically circular, although the deviations between summer and winter required some explanation, but the apparent irregularities of the five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) created a serious difficulty that some kind of geometric pattern must exhibit itself in all of those movements made an article of faith for the Pythagoreans partly suggested by experience from observing the circular movements of the Sun, Moon and constellations, but in any case demanded as a guiding concept for the rational interpretation of whatever astronomical phenomena might be observed; to Pythagoras it appears that such astronomical order was conceived both geometrically and musically, that is by means of visual and auditory imagination combined, for it is recorded of him that on a few memorable occasions in his life he entered into the transcendental experience of actually hearing that celestial music. The general number theory gave rise also to a more particular astronomical result adding the orbits of the five known planets to those of the Sun and Moon and that of the fixed stars gave a total of eight orbits each of which must be conceived as basically circular or as somehow explainable in terms of a combination of circles. However eight was not a good Pythagorean number; the next number above it was ten or the Decad. Two more revolving bodies had therefore to be found and postulated; the need was met by conceiving of the Earth itself as a planet revolving about the same centre as that about which the Sun and other planets revolve and by postulating that behind the Earth on the side opposite to that on which the Greeks and all known peoples resided (Europe, Asia and Africa), there was a tenth revolving body which they called the counter-Earth. A cosmic centre had to be assumed which all ten orbits encircled, and this ultimate centre was conceived as the Central Fire. Of course inhabitants of the known Earth we're unable to see either the counter Earth or the Central Fire; this inability was explained by supposing that the Earth while revolving around the Central Fire kept its inhabited face turned away from the fire and the counter Earth with the result that they were perpetually invisible to Earth people. The hypothesis seems a curious one to contemporary habits of thought, but let it be considered that the Greeks lacking telescopes possess no example of a body rotating on its own axis, whereas experience did show them one example of a revolving body keeping one face towards and one face away from the centre of its orbit — namely the moon." (The Presocratics, Philip Wheelwright).
Well, maybe "contradiction" is the wrong word. I was referring to the essential difference in the Mecca and Medina verses. The Mecca verses speak of tolerance towards non-muslims, the Media verses demand brutal oppression. Yes, if you consider the context, you do get a sort of consistent message, namely: when the islamic population is small and weak, behave nicely towards the others. Once the islamic population becomes strong and dominant, oppress the others.
What I was pointing out is that this is a political roadmap, and not a divine principle (which of course would not change depending on context).
I don't think Pythagoras should get too much credit for the math discoveries in the relationship between physical properties, movement, and sound. I can not prove it, but I would bet he learned from someone familiar with Chinese concepts. Much earlier in time the Chinese had metal bowls and noticed the size of the bowl determined the sound of the bowl and their math took this into consideration. It is possible to control the size of the bowls and get the full scale of musical notes.
This you tube demonstrates a relationship between the physical world and invisible vibrations. I am prone to believe it was women who made these discoveries because of cooking and cleaning and men who then attempted to write of explanations of them.
Open Source
As you have noted, this is a massive project beyond any one person's capabilities. This wold have to be a cooperative effort.
Must be open to all religions
Even if you were to limit this to Islam, you would still have to allow for the different branches/traditions of Islam to translate those theorems specific to their choices of Hadith & Sunna. Compared to the task of converting the religious text into formal syntax (and speaking as someone who has worked with relational databases) this is trivially easy - just add a few high level keys to the database. And once you have done this, any religion could make the attempt to formalize their religious texts.
This would be very cool. And if - as you believe - the other religions are unable to formalize their religious texts, this would prove how superior Islam is to other religions. Yes/no?
BTW - just to be clear - I most emphatically am not volunteering to assist you in this. . . .
Not necessarily.
Judaism has religious advisories too, but I am not really much familiar with them. I suspect that the Rabbinic approach would be formalizable, but it would have to be analyzed.
In Christianity, there is the Martin Luther trial in which the Holy Apostolic Church resolutely rejected Luther's epistemic approach, i.e. "through scripture and reason". From the arguments used in his trial, I think that it is obvious that Luther would have agreed with a formal system. Still, that does not mean that all Christians would be happy with such formal system. In fact, formalizing Christian religious law is actually rather controversial. It may rake up the old conflict again.
For myself, my Faith provides for me a way of life, a purposeful teleological, rational and benevolent universe designed and managed by a rational and benevolent God of pure Good.
To me, without this, the universe is a purely chance driven existential cosmos in which nothing means anything.
In my mind, it’s far more unlikely that this universe of ours developed purely by random chance after the Big Bang ( A theory developed by Father Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest ) that somehow developed a stable set of physics laws that allowed for us to evolve than to believe in a God Who set off the Big Bang and guided the developing universe along His benevolent design.
As for one poster’s assertion that the Church is a sick joke: I respectfully disagree.
The Church did much good in all her 2,020 years. Sure, we’ve had our bad popes and churchmen; but, we’ve had 2,020 years of many wonderful saints who did great and marvelous things for their fellow human beings.
In fact: I’d contend that the Church built Western civilization after the Western Empire’s fall.
As for Luther, his epistemic approach was badly flawed; IMHO. He didn’t do Scripture and reason. In fact, he stated that Aristotle was the third greatest enemy of true religion. His was a fideist approach that subordinated reason to faith. One of my favorite saints, Saint Thomas Aquinas; famously believed that faith and reason are in tandem; not one over the other nor in conflict with the other.
Well, I find the subject controversial. Luther's trial has ripped western Christianity apart. I still don't know what to think about it.
In defence of the Holy Apostolic Church, we can say that our beloved Augustinian friar was still a member of its personnel and was therefore supposed "to toe the party line". On the other hand, someone had to say something about the regrettable practices by the archbishopric of Mainz.
On 25 May 1521, on the final day of the Diet of Worms, in Germany, Martin Luther was declared an outlaw, his literature banned, and his arrest required. In my opinion, it is not possible to understand western Christianity without looking in depth at what happened there. It is truly its pivotal moment.
I agree with you, it was a pivotal moment. As for the “ toe the party line “: in the medieval Church, there was a tradition of disputation in which debates were conducted to hash out questions.
Luther’s posting of his Theses was in line with this tradition. He lost the debates he engaged in 1519 with Johann Eck.
I’m not saying the Church was perfect in discipline and practice in Luther’s time. I agree that someone had to speak up about these problems. The problem was in discipline and practice; not doctrine.
I didn't see a definitive answer to either of my comments/questions.
1 - System must be open source'd
2 - At a minimum, this system would have to allow for different branches of Islam.