by Qcmbr 384 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Sabastious is correct to be curious that he and I are somehow sharing an interchange of some kind. Without words.
I am not saying it can not be coincidental, but it is curious.
I do have a specific example but it was got by private message so I conclude (without words) that it should not be carried on here without permission.
In your opinion Terry can it be implied only with a prompt as in some form of communication? Or can the substance in my head be transformed into someone else's head by another power, not words?
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: Extravagent claims requires extravagent evidence. Your "thoughts" are subjective and not objective. As such, unless they take the form of signatory representations, (gestures, body language, habitual performances, words, writing, etc) communication has no medium of transmission.
In short: no.
So if somebody concludes something correctly, but had no way of knowing it (unless someone is watching me) it is coincidental in your opinion. Sab knew what I did. I did not tell him in any way. It was a real good quess and said with confidence.
OR
There is something higher than language communication. I have heard from someone (an intelligent man) in the know or delirious, who said the government is experimenting with such things and he knows because they have employed him.
I don't know about the ants you've interviewed, Sab, but the ones I've spoken to are very Watchtower Society oriented in doing their duty to the exclusion of introspection, higher education or skepticism. In that sense, they are theocratic.
Speaking of ant mind control. How do you suppose the fungus knows how to direct the ant to the leaf?
-Sab
I have never been more disapointed by a poster. You are being obtuse Terry. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are just being provocative for the sake of discussion.
Its tedious to have the semantic argument about atheist/agnostic yet again.
Theists said their last useful thing a very long time ago. It is probably safe to assume that no startling new lines of evidence are going to be discovered any time soon. Based on every experience I have ever had and every piece of apologetics I have ever read there is not the slightest evidence for god. Therefore I am content to call myself an atheist. I will always be open to consider any evidence that anybody wants to offer. This open mindedness does not make me an agnostic. If you are arguing otherwise you are being very dull and pedantic.
Atheism CONCLUDES (as its very premise) the negation of something (god, gods, deity). How much clearer do I have to be?
It simply says that the theist still has all their work to do but we are listening. Atheism is a provisional claim since you cannot prove a negative. Call it what you like but I call it atheism.
Sam Harris wrote an apologetic. A defensive philosophical treatise. Atheism creates a vacuum in his world that he rushes to fill with explanation justifying why he is just as good and moral as a believer. There is no CONVERSATION. It is one-sided monlogue.
I asssume you have not read "The Moral Landscape"? Sam Harris does not rush "to fill with explanation justifying why he is just as good and moral as a believer". He shows how belief in moral absolutes are not necessary to make ethical choices and how there are objective moral facts that science can help us discover. The alternative of, morality by divine fiat is outdated and counter-productive.
For you to characterise atheism as rude is bizarre. For millenia we have endured the patronsing, judgemental, authoritarian drivel of theism. Sorry if you think we are rude to answer back.
Theists said their last useful thing a very long time ago.
In your opinion.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=be-wary-of-the-righteous-rationalis-2010-10-11
Say what you will about Sam Harris, the man's got guts. In The End of Faith (W. W. Norton, 2005) and Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Harris, a neuroscientist, rejects the notion that science and religion can coexist. We can't believe in science, Harris says, and still believe in supernatural beings that part seas, resurrect dead people and keep tabs on our naughtiness and niceness.
Harris slams nonbelieving apologists for religion such as the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould. With typical rhetorical grandiosity, Gould proposed that science and religion need not conflict because they are "nonoverlapping magisteria" that address separate realms of existence. Science tells us what is, religion what should be. Given all the crimes committed in religion's name, Harris retorts, why would anyone look to it for moral guidance?
I'm with Harris up to this point. I part company with him when he argues in his new book The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010)—which comes fortified with blurbs from Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and other antireligious scientific luminaries—that science can take religion's place as the supreme arbiter of moral "truth". "There are right and wrong answers to moral questions," Harris asserts, "just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics." Questions about morality, he explains, are really questions about human happiness or "well-being," and these questions can be empirically resolved, just as questions about diet and disease can be.
One can raise all sorts of philosophical objections to this position, and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah does just that in a New York Times review ironically titled"Science Knows Best". My concerns about Harris's proposal are simpler: I just look at the harm—historical and recent—wreaked by scientists supposedly concerned with humanity's well-being. Some examples:
—From 1946 to 1948, physicians funded by the National Institutes of Health deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalan prisoners, mental-hospital patients and soldiers with syphilis to test their responses to antibiotics. The leader of this research, John C. Cutler, was also involved in the infamous Tuskegee studies, in which scientists withheld antibiotics from black American males naturally infected with syphilis. "It's ironic—no, it's worse than that, it's appalling—that, at the same time as the United States was prosecuting Nazi doctors for crimes against humanity, the U.S. government was supporting research that placed human subjects at enormous risk,"the bioethicist Mark Siegler told The New York Times.
—In the 1950s and 1960s researchers at leading universities embedded electrodes in the brains of mental patients to test whether minds and bodies can be manipulated via electrical stimulation of neural tissue. In 1969 the Yale physiologist Jose Delgado (whom I profiled in Scientific American in 2005), extolled the benefits of brain implants in his book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society(Harper & Row, 1971). Delgado declared that brain implants could help create "a less cruel, happier and better man." In 1970 Frank Ervin and Vernon Mark, two brain-implant researchers at Harvard University with whom Delgado had collaborated, proposed in their book Violence and the Brain (HarperCollins, 1970) that brain implants and psychosurgery might quell violent crime and rioting in inner cities.
—In recent decades prescriptions of drugs for children, including infants, supposedly suffering from psychiatric illness have skyrocketed. Some 500,000 U.S. children and adolescents are now taking antipsychotic drugs, Duff Wilson reported recently in The New York Times, even though some experts believe the drugs "may pose grave risks to development of both their fast-growing brains and their bodies." In another Timesarticle Wilson details how psychiatrists who tout the benefits of antipsychotics receive grants, vacations, meals and other gifts from drug manufacturers. The Harvard physician Joseph Biederman, whose research helped spur a 40-fold increase in diagnoses of bipolar disorders in children between 1994 and 2003, received $1.6 million, "from companies including makers of antipsychotic drugs prescribed for some children who might have bipolar disorder," according to Wilson.
Some will complain that it is unfair to hold science accountable for the misdeeds of a minority. It is not only fair, it is essential, especially when scientists as prominent as Harris are talking about creating a universal, scientifically validated morality. Moreover, Harris blames Islam and Catholicism for the actions of suicide bombers and pedophilic priests, so why should science be exempt from this same treatment?
Clearly, some bad scientists are just greedy opportunists who care about only their own well-being. But those who fervently believe their own rhetoric about saving humanity may be even more dangerous. Consider the harm done in the name of Marxism and eugenics, pseudoscientific (not religious) ideologies that inspired two of the most lethal regimes in history—Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany.
Harris asserts in Moral Landscape that ignorance and humility are inversely proportional to each other; whereas religious know-nothings are often arrogant, scientists tend to be humble, because they know enough to know their limitations. "Arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity," Harris states. Yet he is anything but humble in his opus. He castigates not only religious believers but even nonbelieving scientists and philosophers who don't share his hostility toward religion.
Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. "The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?
I suspect Harris wants to rely on brain scans to measure "well-being" because he doesn't trust people to simply say what makes them happy. If a Muslim girl says that she likes wearing a veil, as many do, she doesn't know what's good for her, Harris might say. Maybe she doesn't, but magnetic resonance imaging won't help us resolve these sorts of issues.
When scientists venture into the moral realm, they should not claim that their investigations of what is yield special insights into what should be. I realize I'm asking a lot of scientists—and secularists—to be humble when religious and political zealots like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are so bloated with self-righteousness. This asymmetry recalls Yeats's famous line from his poem "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." But if we all become zealots, we're really in trouble.
Harris asserts, "just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics." Questions about morality, he explains, are really questions about human happiness or "well-being," and these questions can be empirically resolved, just as questions about diet and disease can be.
Harris starts out on shaky ground. "Well being."
Terry might say: "This is an imprecise use of language. Define the term!"
What is well being?
There are these secondary comic relief characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies which start out loyal to the Crown. They end up in the end, after their leaders were conquered, just putting on pirate clothing and sailing off into the sunset with the pirate victors. I look at those characters as good representation of atheism. The story of humanity is a deep emotional narrative involving blood sweat and tears which was required for freedom and liberty to even be at the level in society it is now. The atheism craze is a bi product of that freedom and like the fake pirates in the movie they get to ride off into the sunset without having done any of the actual fighting. I agree with Terry that atheism is just an inflated opinion. I also believe it purposefully minimizes the pain it has taken to get where we are at.
It was all just confirmation bias! I see!
-Sab
For the longest time most of humanity simply assumed that the domestic dog came from human tampering with wolf breeding. Recent research has completely flipped that belief on end. What likely happened is a rare form of an evolutionary interlocking of two compatible species. Homo sapiens are a species that historically leave waste behind them. We generally don't eat the banana peel so to speak. But what if something LIVED off of banana peels? This is essentially how specific wolf and dog packs became interested in following the homo sapiens around because of the edible waste. Wolves and dogs are mammals afterall and all mammals have opportunist genetic behaviour built in. Homo sapiens are also mammals and have the same opportunistic potential. When the homo sapiens were evolved enough they tamed the wolf and dog beasts that had been following them solidifying a long tenured evolutionary relationship.
If you simply ask around today you will find people who cannot live without a dog by their side. This is because the relationship between us is ancient. Some people don't have the spiritual connection with dogs that others do becuase of genetics.
Anyway my point is that atheism gets to talk out of both sides of it's mouth. It gets to preach it's "current truth" like that dogs are mostly a man made species. Then at a future date if dogs are ever scientifically shown to have incredible intuitive abilities in relation to the human mind they get to snatch that pirate hat and sail off into the sunset. Atheism is bliss if you can believe in it.
-Sab
