War Room Lounge V20: Halloween Awareness: Dispatches Blast Yo Ass from a Pumpkin Patch

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Fawlty said:
Nah, you reflexively compared me to a racial bigot because you were offended. Poor form. I maintain that "faith" and its entire cognitive dissonance/suspension of disbelief loop is practiced intentionally and that its practitioners are consciously virtualizing their beliefs. If it gets examined too closely, it invariably ends with the practitioner pulling a special pleading trick with "faith."
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I didn't take that to mean that you're like a racial bigot in any sense but that you have trouble relating to people who disagree. I think that's fair and not particularly damning.
 
Jack V Savage said:
3. I think a "belief" in *most* circumstances isn't really "something you think is true." Might be more like "something you feel good about affirming and bad about hearing denied." I'm certainly oversimplifying, but not as badly as people who use the definition I gave in the beginning of this point.
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If we can settle on this definition of "belief" I would concede the argument right now. I have irrational beliefs along those lines myself.
 
Fawlty said:
Look, when you (or anybody) tries to tell me that maybe I just don't get "faith" I know that person is putting on the hustle. The nut ain't under none of the cups.

Historically, religious beliefs have retreated from the earliest known cases where the gods were in the sky/sea/darkness/etc as our knowledge has increased. Now our gods hover somewhere just beyond the observable universe, invisible or out of reach or in another dimension, and so on. I believe we have crossed that point where people can claim that their beliefs are rooted. Importantly, the concept of faith explicitly concedes that whenever it's needed to rescue an unsupportable hypothesis. The history of faith reveals the cleverness of the early church lords.

We don't believe that there is a wizard up there, in there, or down there, because there aren't wizards in those places. We can pretend there are, and we do just that. These unrooted concepts are divorced from our experiences and all of the verifiable information available to us. Faith attempts to come to the rescue here, too, where it is more blatantly used as an imaginary bridge. It's both a method of confirmation and the source of its own evidence. Immune to evidence - suspiciously tidy.

The self-deception is found in its abstractness, the virtualization of belief. We suspend our clear and present disbelief, immerse ourselves in faith and/or the spirit or other methods of evoking certain reactions in ourselves (we can even pray a burning into our own hearts), and create our own confirmations. We can seize upon one of the billions of extreme improbabilities we encounter. We can do lots of play-games. However we choose to play, we can then construct a virtual set of facts that we can plainly see are contradicted by reality. And that's of course part of the appeal, as that is something interesting and beyond our experience (it's insidious).

We choose to dwell in these virtual beliefs. The nice thing about them is that we can take off those virtual glasses, or stop running the faith software, and be normal just about anytime we want.
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You could make the same argument about every belief, including political ideologies.
Are libertarians and communists also practicing deliberate self-deception because there's no evidence for their beliefs? Are there no true believers because we've never seen a functional political state under either system?
Your argument seems to have shifted from all faith is deliberate self-deception, to faith in dieties in the modern era is self-deception because we've achieved a much greater level of knowledge and understanding and there's no empirical evidence. That's based on the assumption that beliefs are a product of empirical knowledge, which is clearly wrong.
 
Fawlty said:
There's a sequel to The Shining wtf have I been I just don't even.
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I finished it in august, they're making a movie of it too.


I'm really sad I missed the king talk
 
Jack V Savage said:
Three comments on this general discussion:

1. I don't understand how anyone who truly believes the Bible is the word of God could have not read it multiple times and tried to memorize it. Yet my observation is that most Christians have not done so.
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Well, firstly, only a minority of Christians believe the Bible is the "word of God." Only 24% in fact.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/210704/record-few-americans-believe-bible-literal-word-god.aspx

2. Likewise, if you really believe in eternal life and that your actions in this one determine your condition in that one, temptation would seem to be extremely easy to resist. Yet my observation is that it is not, even for believers (look at posters like DS or Inga, who profess to be devout and yet are deeply immoral).
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I can't speak to those posters' morality, other than to my observation that Inga is pretty dishonest to a degree that I would have to think is at least partially conscious, but I don't think that is all that contradictory. In previous centuries, where religion was the primary influence on a person's behavior, the thought of eternal consequence pervaded persons' every decision, and piety was thus much more common. However, religion is now only a very small influence on personal behavior: certainly less so than ethnic and popular culture, especially now in an ultra-connected society with a culture that is saturated by agenda setters and influencers.

3. I think a "belief" in *most* circumstances isn't really "something you think is true." Might be more like "something you feel good about affirming and bad about hearing denied." I'm certainly oversimplifying, but not as badly as people who use the definition I gave in the beginning of this point.
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Hmm, that's an interesting way to put it. I can't necessarily agree or disagree.
 
Ruprecht said:
You could make the same argument about every belief, including political ideologies.
Are libertarians and communists also practicing deliberate self-deception because there's no evidence for their beliefs? Are there no true believers because we've never seen a functional political state under either system?
Your argument seems to have shifted from all faith is deliberate self-deception, to faith in dieties in the modern era is self-deception because we've achieved a much greater level of knowledge and understanding and there's no empirical evidence. That's based on the assumption that beliefs are a product of empirical knowledge, which is clearly wrong.
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No, practitioners of political ideologies are advocating for their preference in distribution of physical resources and rules about fair behavior. Religion has occupied this role at times, to decidedly mixed results, and the modern theocracy is a horrifying idea to most and a horrifying reality to an unfortunate few. If you want to say that it's only as bad as Communism, I might endorse that!

There were certainly aspects of Communism, like the rice famine in China, which operated similarly to faith. A lot of people lying to themselves and to the authorities about production numbers, tithing too much to the state, and just having faith in the struggle, that it would all work out.

We've gone down the diety track. We could also go down the miracles track. Or the prophecy track. Or the Savior track. Or the afterlife track (this is perhaps my favorite because it's one I'm particularly susceptible too, so I'm very familiar with bullshitting myself on this). There's no need to go down each track, so let's not call a shift, yeah.

Bold claim that it's "clearly wrong" that beliefs are a product of empirical knowledge.
 
Fawlty said:
No, practitioners of political ideologies are advocating for their preference in distribution of physical resources and rules about fair behavior. Religion has occupied this role at times, to decidedly mixed results, and the modern theocracy is a horrifying idea to most and a horrifying reality to an unfortunate few. If you want to say that it's only as bad as Communism, I might endorse that!

There were certainly aspects of Communism, like the rice famine in China, which operated similarly to faith. A lot of people lying to themselves and to the authorities about production numbers, tithing too much to the state, and just having faith in the struggle, that it would all work out.

We've gone down the diety track. We could also go down the miracles track. Or the prophecy track. Or the Savior track. Or the afterlife track (this is perhaps my favorite because it's one I'm particularly susceptible too, so I'm very familiar with bullshitting myself on this). There's no need to go down each track, so let's not call a shift, yeah.

Bold claim that it's "clearly wrong" that beliefs are a product of empirical knowledge.
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It's not really bold, it's self evident. Basic epistemology and the limits of justification and knowledge. How many things do you "know" that you haven't personally empirically verified? How many beliefs are a product of subjective interpretation or socially constructed knowledge? How many students these days realise that the Bohr model of the atom is only a useful conceptual construct rather than an empirical reality?
Communism has involved more than simply beliefs about resource distribution or rules for behaviour, it includes the idea that dialectical materialism is the appropriate framework for understanding socioeconomics. A Libertarian equivalent would be praxeology as a framework for understanding human action. Frameworks of interpretation are essential components of belief.

It's a shift because you went from saying that everyone who believes is practicing deliberate self-deception, to saying that everyone that has access to a modern education and still believes is practicing self-deception.
 
Ruprecht said:
It's not really bold, it's self evident. Basic epistemology and the limits of justification and knowledge. How many things do you "know" that you haven't personally empirically verified? How many beliefs are a product of subjective interpretation or socially constructed knowledge? How many students these days realise that the Bohr model of the atom is only a useful conceptual construct rather than an empirical reality?
Communism has involved more than simply beliefs about resource distribution or rules for behaviour, it includes the idea that dialectical materialism is the appropriate framework for understanding socioeconomics. Frameworks of interpretation are essential components of belief.

It's a shift because you went from saying that everyone who believes is practicing deliberate self-deception, to saying that everyone that has access to a modern education and still believes is practicing self-deception.
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Absolutely delicious secretions Mr. Ruprecht.... You will be thoroughly tasted for this...
 
Limbo Pete said:
<{1-17}>
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Now is the time to salivate and allow the flavors to coat the wet ingress... Let us pay attention the reverberations of man in his quest to find the precipice of the flow margin within confines of order and chaos...
 
True story: @Fawlty's hate of religion and his sexual depravity are not unrelated.

"Look at me now, God!" he screamed through a mouthful of used tampons while penetrating himself with a cheese grater
 
My bed broke :(

it's best to stick with just one girl at a time. :oops:

IKEA :(
 
Trotsky said:
Those are two phenomena with diametrical explanations, though. The former is founded in a level of knowledge and a dependence on reason that is less pronounced in persons of faith. The latter is founded in a complete lack of knowledge and dependence on limited experience rather than reason.

Personally, I have realized the perpetual blind spot that I have in implicitly assuming my own level of knowledge in other people. Like, I know that the average person is a moron and is unfamiliar with basic truths about things like public policy, but I still find myself assuming otherwise when grappling with their opinions. That is, once I know something it's hard for me understand and empathize the perspectives of persons who don't. It's weird and a problem.
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What a healthy normal attitude.
 
Trotsky said:
True story: @Fawlty's hate of religion and his sexual depravity are not unrelated.

"Look at me now, God!" he screamed through a mouthful of used tampons while penetrating himself with a cheese grater
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Blasphemous, but you are almost there with the poetry. Slight calibrations from the dendrites and the fluids will begin to drip.
 
You know who is really hilarious?

Eugene Levy. That dude kills me.
 
Prokofievian said:
Is it the one with the wood slats for a bed frame? Those things are not hanky panky proof.
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it has a double row of the unattached slats. It's not in the master bedroom at least.
iu
 
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