Gabs,
Great - so we both agree that an analogy should have "the same underlying arguments".
We do now it seems.
In which reply did we previously disagree about whether an analogy should have the same underlying arguments?
The point was that a belief need not be either factually true or socially healthy for it to have a therapeutic benefit for some people nonetheless. If Islam keeps you on the wagon all well and good, but it could still be entirely fictional and have poorer consequences than good for all of us despite that.
I get your point. What I don't get is your original claim that your response was an analogy.
My belief that I stopped drinking because Islam bans drinking is factually true - Islam bans drinking and that is why I stopped drinking alcohol.
How is you saying your commitment to drinking gives you the willpower to stop being a Muslim have a similar underlying argument to what I am saying, if you actually aren't using a commitment to drinking to stop being a Muslim due to you lacking will power?
Or alternatively, how does your statement that your commitment to drinking gives you the willpower to stop being a Muslim, which has a therapeutic benefit for you, have the same underlying argument as the therapeutic effect of belief, if you actually don't have a commitment to drinking in order to stop being a Muslim?
I am not seeing the similarity of the underlying argument between your statement and my statement or between your statement and religious belief. So how you claiming it was an analogy?
No, but approval by association is an old trope: your sobriety because of Islam says nothing to whether it’s universally a force for good or bad.
I made no claim about universality. I spoke very specifically about my happiness in response to Outrider's point that theists are lucky if they are happy with their faith.
You really don’t get this analogy thing do you? I was merely pointing out that the defence of “my beliefs may be bad but so are lots of other beliefs” is analogous to a school bully justifying his behaviour by reference to other bullies in the playground. It wasn’t a discussion about bullying – any other analogy would have done just well.
You really don't know how to use analogies. You keep using analogies for arguments that I have never made. I never said my moral, cultural, political, philosophical, or religious beliefs were bad, nor am I defending bad beliefs in any of these areas - I am pointing out that people holding shared moral, cultural, political, philosophical beliefs can act in as good or as bad a way as people who hold shared religious beliefs. Therefore if you cannot isolate the cause of good or bad behaviour to religion alone, and you can't rid people of moral, cultural, political or philosophical beliefs, there is no logic to just focusing on religious belief as being problematic.
This is a religion and ethics board, so why the focus on religion alone?
Firstly that just seems to be a non-religious faith position or belief you hold that if you present enough evidence and argument all non-theists will change their minds.
Did you actually read what I said? I’m saying you cannot persuade people to change their minds when their minds are made up as a matter of “faith”, whereas – in principle at least – you can when their positions are based on reason and evidence.
That’s the point!
Faith is not restricted to religious faith. That's the point.
You seem to have faith in your position that non-religious people will make up their minds based on reason and evidence while religious people will simply act on faith. There is no evidence to show that people lacking religious faith won't instead make up their minds based on their moral, cultural, philosophical or political beliefs. In which case, the religious and non-religious will both be using a mix of beliefs and reason and argument to make up their mind on an issue.
We can get to the practicalities if you like, but the principle is simple enough: “But that’s my faith” cannot be falsified. There’s nothing to falsify, no process, no method, no argument, no anything that can be deployed as a rebuttal regardless of the object of the faith – gods or leprechauns alike.
And how do you falsify "but that's my political belief" or "that's my moral belief" etc etc. In which case why the focus on religious beliefs if all other beliefs are immune to rebuttal?
Now in practice what tends to happen is that when the argument or evidence becomes sufficiently persuasive some of the religious (I’m excluding the TWs of this world here) will tend to re-interpret their holy texts to accommodate that – in respect of evolution or gay marriage for example – along the lines of, “what this book really means is…” (which is why they tend to be so far behind the Zeitgeist) which gets them off the falsification problem and leaves the bits they cling to intact nonetheless.
In brief, “they” change their minds when the cognitive dissonance is too much to bear but not when it isn’t.
You have a problem with theists thinking and pondering about their beliefs and changing their minds? I thought your problem was that they don't think and ponder and change their mind?
In other words, what you're saying is that in practice many theists think and ponder and change their opinions, as do atheists, so that's a good thing.
Yes I agree that stubbornly held beliefs by violent theists and atheists is a problem.
No we don’t agree.
First, did you mean “violent theists” and “violent atheists” there? While various religious faiths mandate violence of various types, atheism isn’t a belief and it mandates nothing. You can be an atheist and a murderer, but there’s no logical path from atheism to murder.
I did not say anything about atheism leading to murder, I specifically spoke about violent atheists. My concern is about the practicalities - as in a person can be an atheist, can be violent, and that this is a problem. You seem to want to narrow it down to a theoretical argument about "atheism" whereas I prefer to keep the focus on people and their actual behaviour, since your main complaint about the religious is their actual behaviour.
Second, atheism in any case tends to be characterised by the openness to being wrong if ever someone could produce a coherent argument to the contrary. Any “stubbornness” is a stubbornness about insisting on a supporting logic, whereas the stubbornness of the religious is the insistence that the object of the claims is true – a qualitatively different thing.
Yes you have already stated that you are stubbornly clinging to your faith position that faith positions held by theists specifically are more problematic than non-religious faith positions.
