Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
RE: Summary
Science appears to be your religion.
I am not a scientist but I see the value and respect the important role that science plays in our world, but science is amoral.
In the end you still end up asking "why am I here and why do I care that I am here".
If there is nothing beyond the microscope or telescope then there is no moral right or wrong, the only things that should drive us are our appetites and the ability to impose our will on others.
RE: Summary
Wow, a whole month and your opinion hasn't changed even in the slightest. Not only that, you have the audacity to assume your opinion is the be-all conclusion to the argument.
You have entered the "discussion" with a closed mind and have left it in the same state. I hope you're proud of the time you have wasted.
It is my sincere hope that the next time you try to engage in a religious discussion, you won't spend as much time trying to convince the religious as you will trying to understand the religious - weather you agree with them or not.
RSS
Summary
Since everything has died down in this post, I wanted to summarize the debate and see what salient points bear repeating.
1. Logic is not sufficient to know the world but it is necessary for one's beliefs to be non-contradictory in order for them to be correct.
2. At least no one presented counter-evidence to my claim that terms like 'spirit' and 'supernatural' have no referent in the world. No one has even sufficiently defined the terms, much less commended any reader to an experience in which one would be forced to believe that natural and physical forces are insufficient to explain the world. In fact, terms like 'natural' only gain meaning in juxtaposition to terms like 'supernatural' which are ill-defined at best.
3. I proposed a rule of epistemology that anything asserted with no evidence in its favor should be rejected as arbitrary. While any meaningful sentence could be coincidentally true, unless someone has a rational [experienced] or logical [entailed] means of knowing its truth, it should be rejected for lacking a context of discovery or justification. No one denied my proposed rule.
4. Insofar as anyone did attempt to justify their belief in deities, everyone who bothered appeared to conclude that God must be supernatural, not simply one more object in the world of human experience.
In short, I think these three arguments and one observation about believers in deities are sufficient to reject all arguments that anyone deemed fit to present in defense of faith in some deity. It is my sincere hope that anyone who does believe in some deity will be hesitant from now on to use that deity as a justification for any ethical belief.
View Full Discussion