If mathematics teacher made a mistake, would it mean mathematics itself is wrong!

by venus 102 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cofty

  jw's and Mormon's make more atheist than any other groups combined

  It may be true. Unlike 99% of 'people of faith' many JWs and Mormons had to fearlessly apply facts and reason in order to escape a controlling cult. If they go on to apply those same critical thinking skills to all the claims of theism it will lead to atheism.

  The vast majority of believers have never faced up to the failings of their religion because it doesn't demand much from them.

  Of course many ex-JWs lose their nerve and stop at some sort of alternative faith system.
  
  
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  _Morpheus

  Seems true to me.
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  Giordano

  Many people point to the irrationality in the depiction of God by the religions and their scriptures, hence jump into the bottomless pit of atheism.

  Atheism is based on a lack of evidence for the existence of a god. On the contrary it is up to you to prove that god exists and that is the bottomless pit you find yourself in.

  If you are unable to provide good reason to accept the existence of your god, it is unreasonable to expect the atheist to construct a disproof of it - or even care much about the claim in the first place.
  
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  steve2

  Venus, your OP presumes that the bad (and incorrect) examples of god and religion lead to people becoming athiests.

  Wrong. These certainly do not help but they are far from the guts of the matter.

  You wipe aside centuries of considered thought, observation and argument that draws very little upon religion's "failures" and significantly more from rational, clear thinking thought free from religious superstition.
  
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  steve2

  You all got struck with the word MATHEMATICS! I can’t believe it.

  It is telling when the OP's main analogy obstructs what the writer intended and the writer then scolds readers.

  Me thinks the writer needs to learn how to develop helpful analogies - not ones that obstruct.
• 

  waton

  Math is a human invention. Some of it's tenets are considered fundamental truth. Einstein said (with tongue in cheek) that he would feel sorry for "the Lord" (supposed indirect generator of math) if his (Albert's) formulae, thought-experiment derived would be found to be valid. No mistakes here, but what he considered his biggest mistakes are now considered validated by experiments ( universal constant, accelerated spavetime expansion)

  According to his comment, A mathematitian could be wrong, even the Creator could be wrong. mathematics could not. of course, he could have been wrong about that.
• 

  Finkelstein

  Many people point to the irrationality in the depiction of God by the religions and their scriptures, hence jump into the bottomless pit of atheism.

  But when you support a supernatural creator you have to contrive lies and evoke intellectual dishonesty to help define what a god is, essentially an emotive concept with no evidence.

  Spiritualism is more of a bottomless pit because there are so many variable concepts of a spiritual god creator(s)
  

  Perhaps from that understand maybe Venus can define for us what is a spirit or is it a concept created wholly within human imagination. ?
  
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  steve2

  I don't know about "jumping into a bottomless pit of atheism", but I've seen untold numbers of people jumping into a bottomless pit of theism - in fact, often times no jump is necessary: They're born into it - so no affirmative action is required.
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  TerryWalstrom

  Math is a tool of thought which is represented in a particular manipulation of agreed-upon procedures which produces exact agreement in results IF and ONLY if the procedures (operations) are exactly followed.
  Religion is exemplified by practitioners whose eisegesis is subjective and non-reproducible, as well as incompatible with every other exegete referencing Holy Writ in whatever translation may be proffered.
  
  In other words, Math isn't Math without the rigor of Logic and Rules.
  Religion creates meta-rules and no logic.

  Creation begins with ZERO (invisible God and no universe) and divides everything by that Zero.
  In Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell grappled with the meta-nature of set theory and discovered what religious minds have never acknowledged.
  ______
  

  As Russell tells us, it was after he applied the same kind of reasoning found in Cantor’s diagonal argument to a “supposed class of all imaginable objects” that he was led to the contradiction:

  The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as “everything,” then, “everything” is something, and is a member of the class “everything.” But normally a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not? If it is, it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e., it is not a member of itself. If it is not, it is not one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself. Thus of the two hypotheses – that it is, and that it is not, a member of itself – each implies its contradictory. This is a contradiction.
  _____

  In Mainstream historical Christianity:
  God is 3 persons in one.
  In Math:
  A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One. - Georg Cantor
  _______
  *Mathematical induction is a technique used in proving mathematical assertions. The basic idea of induction is that we prove that a statement is true in one case and then also prove that if it is true in a given case it is true in the next case. This then permits the cases for which the statement is true to cascade from the initial true case.
  (Religion considers proof impudent and faithless.)
• 

  Crazyguy

  Faith in god is a practice of belief devoid of facts , logic, reason and common sense. If a person wants to believe in a deity but that deity does absolutely nothing for a person in his or her life then what’s the point?!