L'éléphant

Hah! Good one. I guess the statement "There are no bigfoot, ghosts, and aliens" could logically trip you off. But in fiction, we could be at liberty t...

They are real. I think my OP implied that. We do accept them as true. What we can't really show the floaters to others. Only accounts of people who've...

haha! Good one! That does not require proof! That's what I'm saying -- my justification for the truth of my dream is your own experience, and vice ver...

Good points! Dreams, pain, and fear are especial because they are never out there for others to witness. When I'm dreaming, you can't see or know what...

So then why is it often required of belief in god that a proof be produced, when we do have other claims, equally important, such pain and fear, which...

Excellent point. Belief in god could be both viewed as private or public (later about this) -- private like pain, as you said. In which case, nothing ...

:rofl:

Like twisted mind?

I haven't changed my tune since I've written the OP. I can explain again. I said that there are things that we accept without requiring proof. I gave ...

There could be no other vulnerabilities you would suffer greater than what the sleeping hat could produce.

And if we want to expand our search for accepted truths without proof -- how about the big bang theory? Here they really don't have a proof, per se. B...

Going back to the issue you touched on earlier -- life and death situation as against other topics that others might simply dismissed as philosophical...

Cute dogs.

Okay we can also include those. But, again, my point is, we don't require proof for certain things we claim to be true or we accept from accounts of o...

Make sure you place your neck by your feet before you try it to avoid snapping your neck like a dried twig.

Okay, I misspoke when I said "philosophical proof". That needs explaining. What I meant was, proof that we accept as epistemologicaly sound-- so it co...

Fortunately, in a philosophical argument, we don't distinguish between life and death situation when requiring proof to back up our claims. I mean, ju...

:up: Okay, you got one thing right -- causality. But did you read what Schopenhauer wrote (I posted a passage in this thread). See where the necessity...

I agree. And that is also true of the other 4 points I outlined. We give them the benefit of the doubt. Yes, this happens but under a different circum...

You missed the point of my argument about the existence of dreams. And you totally did not get the dreams/dreaming exist. There's no doubt about it, p...

I don't think this is the "thinking" we're talking about in this thread. I gave examples of Descartes, Aristotle, and Schopenhauer's idea of freedom i...

This bothers me. Time count begins when something changes. A void with no space-time has no time. Time starts at the mark of a change. "Universe and n...

@"EugeneW" Could you be arsed to go outside of this thread and have a smoke outside the building? You're loitering.

Stop it. You don't understand what a proof is.

This is not evidence! I knew you were gonna say this. Look, if I said I dreamed I was floating, I would not be able to produce proof of me floating. W...

What about it?

Can anyone explain why we readily claim that we dream, or that we readily accept that this or that person had a dream, when we can't provide evidence ...

Let's not use this. This is a fallacy.

Can we bring this thread back to the compound of sanity? What kind of evidence do atheists ask? Scientific? Then, no. There's no scientific proof for ...

I was never a voracious reader. My reading habits only developed when I studied philosophy. So, my reading habits is what you get when you read philos...

There is no just war. (Do not start me with self-defense as it is a silly notion). War happens because diplomacy and agreement failed. Country A might...

Yes, thanks for reference on Mead. I didn't know he wrote extensively on this subject -- the development of sense of self. So, to him, from my cursory...

Thank you for these passages. The Petrarch one is what I had in mind about renaissance. Your comments are on point.

@"Bob Ross" I understand that you said "positively assert anything". There is more than one way to skin a cat. It's all positive if you asked me.

What the fuck happened to thread? How did this become a troll enclave? Incorrect. Atheists do assert something: God does not exist. In mythology no le...

There is no "should or shouldn't" in math. Use "or".

Who said that? I was referring to the article you linked, which referenced 6 BCE, and then proceeded to describe the pygmies as non-spiritual, non-sup...

:halo:

I find that article suspect because pygmies would not have been able to make a statement, god does not exist. If they didn't have a concept of spiritu...

You mean bone-headed, dismissive reason.

Except that sex gets stale, money does not.

There is polytheistic. Belief in all gods. I guess the thing is, the onus is on the atheists, not the theists. Theists: God exists, we believe in god....

Yeah, it's tempting. It's like promising yourself not to touch the bottle.

To me atheism does not make sense. What it tells me is, atheists don't believe in something that never existed in the first place. It's a circular arg...

So many consciousness and awareness threads.

It is not. At least not mathematically. "Times" is the inverse of division. Try, ten times weaker. Does that sound like the phrase "5 times fewer"?

A rebuttal to the naturalistic view of mind -- freedom in thinking is only an illusion - is this: how do the adherents of naturalism determined this "...

Okay. NATO represents the west.

I'm not following what's going on in the war. Who did bad faith?

True. Is that your propaganda?