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[Gordon]

A nice wee pastiche from Jeremy.

The statement "the bowl is empty" is a positive claim. I'm making a definite claim that the bowl is in a particular state. As such, it demands evidence to substantiate it.

The position of most atheists is more like "I have no reason to believe there is anything in the bowl, therefore, for the moment, I will assume there is nothing in it".

I would go a little further. I observe that the Milkians have been trying to find evidence for milk in the bowl for 2,000 years and have so far only produced a few anonymous stories to support their claim. To me this shifts the balance of probability to the bowl being empty or at least not having milk in it.

Milkianity has an interesting history, by the way. Milkians believe the bowl was filled with fresh milk 2,000 years ago which then went sour after being left out for three days. However, it was rendered fresh again in a miraculous event known as the Pasteurisation. In the early days, some Milkians held unorthodox beliefs: some believed the milk was turned to cheese; others - yoghurt. However these dairytics were all put to the sword by the true Milkians. The bloodshed was as nothing, however, compared to what happened in the 15th century after the schism between the full fatolics and the semi-skimmedants.

[SweetPea]

It's been a long day with the wee ones.... and this just gave me a smile..

from Vlad on the Quoting Jesus thread:

Antony Flew was an atheist philosopher and key person in evidentialism who gave up atheism. Gave atheism up, packed atheism in, flushed atheism down the toilet, binned it, repudiated it. Gave it the bums rush, flicked it the middle finger, bid it aufwiedersehen, wished it luck as he waved it goodbye, had a whip round for it, gave it the last rites, buried it in boot hill, left it in the big white bag outside the charity shop.

[Shaker]

torridon playing a blinder (again):

All you are claiming, is that we feel in control, therefore we are supernatural.  This is the sort of unevidenced irrational naive thinking you might expect from a ten year old still immersed in a storybook world, it is not worthy of an educated adult.  An alpha male chimpanzee exerts control over his group so do we scratch our heads in astonishment and conclude that the alpha male must therefore be supernatural ?  All this demonstrates is a readiness to abandon reason and enquiry in the face of the merest intellectual challenge and regress back to magic thinking, and magic thinking in the end solves nothing it merely hides issues you cannot fathom. 'God's will' and 'human will' merely provide a magic cover, they do not further or deepen any understanding

[Aruntraveller]

Bluehillside addressing leprachauns  Vlad:

As you’ll have some more time today on your way to A&E again to get the hole in your other foot fixed (is that what you meant when you claimed to be "holistic" perhaps?), let’s have one final go at explaining to you where you keep crashing and burning here.

Fundamentally, you don’t know what the word “analogy” means. An analogy is a comparison between different objects in order to explain or clarify an argument. “It was a roller-coaster of a film” for example doesn’t mean that the cinema threw you around the place, but rather that your emotional response was analogous to the experience of a fairground ride.

Your mistake responding with the equivalent to “but one is a room with soft seats and a screen, the other is an outdoor ride so they’re not analogous at all”, thereby entirely missing the point.

You can talk all you like about whether leprechauns are natural, supernatural or anything else just as you can talk about the differences between a cinema and a fairground ride. In each case though the effort is utterly, entirely, unequivocally, categorically, irredeemably irrelevant.

What is relevant though – and this is the bit you never get around to dealing with – is that “God” and leprechauns are epistemically the same when the same argument produces either outcome with equal facility. What that argument is doesn’t matter at all: “You can’t disprove god/leprechauns, therefore god/leprechauns (the NPF); “Other people agree with me about god/leprechauns” (argumentum ad populum); “I don’t like the idea of no god/leprechauns (argumentum ad consequentiam); “I prayed to god/leprechauns for a promotion and got the job, therefore god/leprechauns” (post hoc ergo propter hoc); “I know god/leprechauns exist because it says so in a book, god/leprechauns wrote the book (circular reasoning) and, wearily, on and on they go.

You’ll notice that none of these bad arguments are bad because of any of the characteristics of their outcomes – you can claim anything, assert any behaviours, describe any features and characteristics about god/leprechauns that take your fancy – none of that though makes one jot of a smidgin of an iota of a snippet of a difference to the point of the argument which, yet again, is:

WHEN AN ARGUMENT FOR GOD WORKS JUST AS WELL FOR LEPRECHAUNS, THEN IT’S PROBABLY A BAD ARGUMENT.

Your choice here is either to continue your relentless dishonesty with a, “but god is X, whereas leprechauns are Y” irrelevance or – finally – you could at least try to engage with the argument that’s actually been made.

Up to you really.   

[Nearly Sane]

Vlad on Jacob Rees Mogg

Far be it for me to tell the Pope what to do but he should excommunicate Rees-Mogg, the precedence being the fuck up the church made in supporting Franco.

[Shaker]

Outrider demonstrating why his return after a long absence is so welcome:

What methodology other than 'I really, really, really want what my ancestors really wanted to be true to turn out to actually be true' do you propose? Faith is unrealiable, and for those of us with any sort of logic-dominated thought processes 'just want it to be true' isn't enough.

[Gordon]

A great one-liner from Walter.

we only want emotionally charged opinions here , no facts please 

[torridon]

Blue nailing it with his customary adroitness :

See, here’s the thing. If you want to attempt the special pleading of “consciousness would have to be fully explained whereas "soul" doesn’t have to be explained at all” then anyone else can play that game too. To take the above examples, I now have a free hand to assert our model of gravity to be wrong and that it's actually caused by pixies with very small strings, and for disease to be caused by wicked spirits. After all, just as you do I can “define” these agencies by what the do (hold stuff down and cause disease respectively) and, naturally, being supernatural there can be no naturalistic explanations for them of any kind. Zip. Nothing. Nada. The square root of zilch.

[Gordon]

NS inhabiting the role of the NPF (as perhaps only NS could).

Been utterly fabulous, me and incredulity got together for a big sesh with George Clooney, the Duchess of Cambridge and the fattest pig in the world at The Sagrada Familia, and we danced tributes to Rev Richard Coles in Strictly. I do love incredulity but he kept bringing down the vibe by saying it wasn't happening because he just couldn't believe it, so I told him as with everyone else, prove it doesn't.


Anyway off to watch Harvey Weinstein be installed as the He-Man Moderator of the church of Iceland, and yes I do mean the store.

[Shaker]

Outrider doing what he does best, only better:

... the way to convince people of the failures of religion is with logic, reason and evidence, and if they were the sort of people that would be influenced by those they wouldn't be theists in the first place. The point is to keep making the point publicly and clearly so that more and more impressionable youngsters grow up in a world where there are no sacred cows, where the holy is ridiculed, where the obvious nudity of the Emperor is printed in the headlines every day. This is the long game.

[Shaker]

Outrider fan club newsletter, Autumn 2017 issue:

I see your 'Millions of people can't be wrong' and raise you a 'the global homeopathy market in 2016 was estimated to be over $2 billion'.

As a health and safety professional I can attest to the rule 'Always count on human stupidity.'

[Aruntraveller]

I've come out of hiding to post this because HH (as he often is) is spot on:


Target setting appears to be a UK government interpretation of management by objectives. MbO is essentially a process whereby a manager and a subordinate arrive at a mutually-agreed combination of resource investment and consequent outcomes.

In the UK government model there appears to be no mutual agreement merely an arbitrary target imposed by politicians on practitioners. As time goes by the targets become more demanding - the rationale being that practice produces improvement in operations which thus become more "efficient".

Targets are almost always driven by efficiency, not effectiveness.
[/quote]

[SweetPea]

Love this one from Udayana....

We sat behind Prince Charles at a performance of Macbeth in Stratford a few years back, his height and ears were a big nuisance. Get rid.

We could replace them by choosing, say, a hundred adults at random and have them fight it out to be king/queen for the next 10 years ... much more entertaining .. like GoT. They get all the trappings but no power and have to agree to be filmed 24x7 ... and executed if they get too boring (hmm.. is that too far?)

Bread and circuses. 

[Harrowby Hall]

NS - Making complete sense

As has already been pointed out, it's his use of it that is the problem. Further, I am not sure that it would ever be sensible for the Commander in Chief to effectively dismiss the death of a member of the military as 'they knew what they signed up for'


Leaving Trump's use of it aside, I am not convinced by the idea that he is correct or that it is true. I've seen a couple of pieces that suggest that the death of David Johnson related to a number of cockups, in particularly that the rescue helicopter was a non military contractor and that there was no check of numbers which lead to him being left behind in error while still alive.  While one has to wary of false news, if it is the case then he didn't sign up for that.


In addition, there is a current campaign to stop people being signed up to the army at 18, and there is the idea that Gordon Gentle who was killed at 19 wasn't perhaps as sure about what he signed up, especially the lack of proper equipment that contributed to his death. The whole 'Join the Army, See the World' or get a trade approach has been used to offer a chance for many kids who have limited opportunities to think it is much more glamorous and much less dangerous.

I am sure there are many in the military who have carried out a rational cost benefit analysis of what they have signed up for but no one signs up for incompetence, no one signs up for useless kit, and no one signs up for their commander in chief being so crass as to make a grieving mother's grief worse. As a pacifist, it can be too easy to see joining the military as some kind of claim to violence, but many of them are barely more than kids, given a chance to escape a life with little hope, badly equipped to evaluate the likelihood of being badly equipped. We like our cannonfodder.

[Nearly Sane]

From HH - honestly, not just returning the compliment:

First of all, let's get some basic neuroscience and psychology out of the way. We don't "see" things, we perceive them. Our eyes are rather imperfect organs with which we receive visual information. The actual seeing is done in the visual cortex, contained in the parietal lobe of the brain, although appropriate investigation also shows that other parts of the brain are involved.

At the fairly mechanistic level of visual perception it can be shown that, in the eye itself, only a small percentage of the visual field is "in colour" only a very small area is "sharp", that there is an area with no visual sensors at all, the "blind spot" and that visual information falling the left side of the retina is sent to the right-hand side of the brain (and vice versa). What we perceive as reality is actually an elaborate construction based on visual information, memory and expectation.

Perception is not veridical. it can allow for all sorts of subjective influences to condition what we think is real. Another perceptual phenomenon is music. Musical instruments do not produce music - they produce a toot, or a whistle or a plunk or a boom. Our brains reassemble those sounds into the physical and emotional experience we call music. If you want an interesting example of this, at the start of the last movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony. The first and second violins are each playing their parts from the score but you hear neither - you here a melody which nobody is playing.

To get onto digital photography. The advent of digital photography has produced the situation where almost anyone can produce elaborate fakes. A few years ago the film Gravity won numerous awards. But few people watching the film were aware that most of what they were seeing was produced in the computers of a company called Framestore, in central London. About 90% of the film was the result of digital processes. The software to manipulate digital photographs - both still and moving - is readily available, in some cases simply by downloading from the internet.

The "spirit" image in the clip which Sriram finds so convincing can be much more readily accepted as fake than real by people with open minds.

[Nearly Sane]

From Walter on the Remembrance Sunday thread.


to continue with this argument is futile . It is what it is and each individual will see it as they wish and attach emotion to it as it suits them . I don't remember ever discussing with any other individual what remembrance day means to them, I only care what it means to me .

[Shaker]

Torridon acing it - again:

I once worked for a Laos based NGO supporting victims of disability prejudice.

And what was the underlying reason for such prejudice ?  Our field workers reported the same story over and over again - it was a belief in karma,  disabled and disfigured individuals were targetted for hate because of the widespread belief that they were being punished for, and deserved being punished for, their immorality in a previous life.

Irrational beliefs always come with costs attached. Irrational beliefs always cause harm.

[Walter]

From Rhi on western philosophy thread
True and very amusing

Unlike most people who dismiss Chopra's stuff as utter shit I've actually read some of it.

It's utter shit.

[Shaker]

JeremyP being right on the 'Libel' thread:

I think claims of anti-semitism are often used to shut down criticism of the modern state of Israel. On the other hand, some of the criticism of modern Israel are unfair. At least, in Israel, if you are gay you can live a life without fear. This is not the case in the Palestinian controlled territory or any of the surrounding Islamic states.

[Shaker]

Bluehillside pulling off the previously improbable feat of summing up R & E in a single paragraph:

Look, it’s simple enough. If you’re feeling upset that a cherished notion has been undone but so out of your depth that you can’t process it just say so. There are people here who readily will help you with the basics of how logic and argument work, and moreover you’ll be better equipped to deal with the world once you do grasp it.

[jeremyp]

This made me laugh

Africvan military regimes have rarely been any closer to democratic than Mugabe's.

Surely the first word in your post is redundant?

No, it was Africvan.

[Gordon]

A great one-liner from Shaker (from the flat-earthers thread).

Remember: the only thing that flat-earthers fear is sphere itself.

[Shaker]

Torridon doing the torridon thing:

You didn't grasp the significance of the previous post.  There is ultimately no puppeter and puppets scenario; there is no controller and the controlled.  This is a mindset gifted to us by ancient theism which envisioned our reality as one created by a creator who is separate from its creation, and thousands of years on, people are still having difficulty in excising this way of thinking. There is no separation between us and a creator god, there is no separation of humans from nature; rather humans, along with termites and tree frogs and all else exist in a shared reality and interact in ways which boil down to logic ultimately.  There is nothing separate controlling us, but rather, our actions and choices are the working out of the fundamental principles that underlie all things; our actions and choices are the manifestation of deep logic through the domain of higher biology.  The very notion of 'control' needs to be ditched; it is just a naive anthropomorphism that serves to keep understanding at bay.

[Shaker]

Gordon on the epic SfG thread sitting there at his computer being all right in his rightness:

...  your particular approach to theism, Alan, is getting in the way of your thinking. I suspect you have the compartment in your head labelled 'God' so well protected by now that were you ever to realise just how fallacious your attempts at reasoning are then your belief in 'God' would be a casualty - so you stick doggedly to your mantra.

[Owlswing]

From Shaker - responding to Rhiannon

from: Rhiannon on Today at 08:58:56

    This is what I think too. Catholics who also happen to make porn.

They're rubbish. Ten minutes of hard-core sex, four and a half hours of guilt.