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

[spin]

or you're not having sex with anyone at all.

 

[Prokofievian]

or you're not having sex with anyone at all.

 

[Prokofievian]

Mine are still intact after several years.

Maybe I'm just having sex with insufficiently large women.

A proper battle slut must have a bit of heft to her. How else could she survive the rigours of the cock carousel?

 

[Quipling]

or you're not having sex with anyone at all.

I'm gonna shine a uv light on my furniture, take a picture, and post it to the 'dawg. Then you'll be sorry!

 

[Jack V Savage]

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

That's a poll on literalism rather than divine inspiration, no?

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.

Well, yeah. I think that "belief" in the first sense (something you think is true) was probably much stronger at other times.

I think that we are naturally better at identifying kind of subjective truths. We've discovered methods that work to identify objective truths and institutionalized some of them so that even people who don't habitually practice those methods (and no one does with anything like perfect consistency) can get the big things right. I think the tension there is really behind the big political splits.

Hmm, that's an interesting way to put it. I can't necessarily agree or disagree.

How do you feel about it?

 

[Prokofievian]

I'm gonna shine a uv light on my furniture, take a picture, and post it to the 'dawg. Then you'll be sorry!

 

[Fawlty]

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

Awkward and stupid comment.

 

[Fawlty]

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.

I meant grain, not rice by the way. It was late.

And no, again I'll explain this. I'm not "shifting" at all. You wanted me to elaborate on the historical context, and I did. God got kicked out of the universe because we learned there was no god out there. When that happens, when God is no longer the sun or some celestial object, God has to become a more abstract concept, and the trick of faith - an abstraction in its own right - is to substitute itself into every place where people's real experiences and knowledge belie the truth.

You're also not going to pull the old Christian bullshit trick of "you haven't seen it yourself so you don't know." You'd excoriate somebody for applying that in another context. That's ripskater-level nonsense. Again, fallacies and garbage thinking come flying out of you when your faith gets involved. This is very typical of smart people who pretend to believe in God. It's just a flailing extension of The God of the Gaps. If evidence were not causal to belief, we wouldn't have many of our cognitive biases that actively reject evidence.

Tell me more about this "true faith" while you're at it. This mythical, magical beast that is immune to evidence, has no burden of proof, and is true because it is true. (hogwash)

I already granted that Communism has some faith elements, as does any totalitarian ideology I've ever looked at. Doesn't produce great results. Dialectical materialism often starts to look like faith as its abstractions begin to leave behind the material world. It certainly loses its grounding, anyway. On that note, I'll take back what I said about political philosophies being ways of distributing resources etc, because they do tend to leave that behind. The modern Republican Party is an accelerated example of giving objective reality and truth the slip on a massive scale. At least they are trying to explain real things. They do have that going for them, unlike some Abrahamic religions I could mention.

I still maintain that Christians are suspending their disbelief, are aware that faith is phony, and are intentionally going with it anyway. I've described the method (faith), and the motive is readily apparent (religion is very useful socially, and can be jimmy-rigged to be compatible with everyday morality). The best argument that can be made is that these people are merely incredibly stupid, and don't believe in biology, chemistry or physics. I give them more credit. I think that instead of being mentally retarded, they've subtly virtualized the idea of belief, using faith like it's both duct tape and super glue to handle the gaping holes. I think that when confronted with this, they have no choice but to recognize it as true, and I think that process of seeing the truth and burying it happens over and over and over again, throughout their lives- this phenomenon even has a name - it's a test of faith.

 

[HereticBD]

Question @Fawlty:

Are Christians the only faith pretending, or are they all pretending?

 

[Fawlty]

Question @Fawlty:

Are Christians the only faith pretending, or are they all pretending?

I know a lot more about Christianity than any other religion, so I prefer to stick to Christianity. But it might be a safe assumption that whenever "faith" is used to affirm obviously false or magical things and to substitute for knowledge, you're dealing with a person who is either mentally ill, full of shit, brainwashed, completely insular and backwards technologically, etc. Somebody not close to the normal condition.

 

[HereticBD]

I know a lot more about Christianity than any other religion, so I prefer to stick to Christianity. But it might be a safe assumption that whenever "faith" is used to affirm obviously false or magical things and to substitute for knowledge, you're dealing with a person who is either mentally ill, full of shit, brainwashed, completely insular and backwards technologically, etc. Somebody not close to the normal condition.

What exactly is the "normal condition", Fawlts? I can assure you with great confidence, that no matter what walk of life you come from, that it isn't Atheism.

 

[Fawlty]

What exactly is the "normal condition", Fawlts? I can assure you with great confidence, that no matter what walk of life you come from, that it isn't Atheism.

What I mean to say is that it's either religious pretense similar to Christianity, or it's some abnormal condition like those I listed. You're right, I'm not saying the normal condition doesn't include religious pretense. Religious people with ridiculous ideas function well otherwise (which I believe is good evidence that they are being deceptive).

 

[HereticBD]

What I mean to say is that it's either religious pretense similar to Christianity, or some abnormal condition like those I listed. You're right, I'm not saying the normal condition doesn't include religious pretense.

But you're ignoring great evidence to the contrary, and giving yourself a huge out to excuse anybody who claims to believe, with the whole "brainwashing" thing.

What exactly is "brainwashing" in this context? People who don't believe what you believe are brainwashed? You're the omnipotent one with all the answers? Maybe you're brainwashed? You're the Atheist in the minority, so maybe you're the mentally ill one?

 

[Jack V Savage]

What I mean to say is that it's either religious pretense similar to Christianity, or it's some abnormal condition like those I listed. You're right, I'm not saying the normal condition doesn't include religious pretense. Religious people with ridiculous ideas function well otherwise (which I believe is good evidence that they are being deceptive).

I think the abnormal people are the ones who try to use evidence and logic to examine their beliefs. Most people, even most high-functioning, intelligent people, use something like "trust the experts and experience" as the basis for the vast majority of their beliefs, including their deepest, most-treasured ones. There's little difference in the process between people for whom "trust the experts" means accepting the climate-science consensus and people for whom it means accepting the truth of Christianity.

I'm not saying that they're equal either in truth value or in how easy it is to prove them. We can look under the hood of climate science, and we can check the results of science generally. But in terms of why people believe them, there is a lot of similarity.

 

[Fawlty]

But you're ignoring great evidence to the contrary, and giving yourself a huge out to excuse anybody who claims to believe, with the whole "brainwashing" thing.

What exactly is "brainwashing" in this context? People who don't believe what you believe are brainwashed? You're the omnipotent one with all the answers? Maybe you're brainwashed? You're the Atheist in the minority, so maybe you're the mentally ill one?

Brainwashed would be somebody like a cultist in a fundamentalist Mormon settlement, or somebody brutally abused by a fundamentalist preacher father, that sort of thing. It's a corner case. I'm not referring to a typical religious upbringing there. It's not an out, it's an exception to the norm. I literally said "not close to the normal condition" after that sentence. You should have picked up on that.

I'm not omnipotent, you'll be relieved to hear. I think that Christians, beneath the pageantry and the faith, know they're full of it.

 

[Prokofievian]

Humans are boundedly rational. Whether people can come to correct decisions and inferences about the world is sort of a secondary point: a lot of the time, and I would suspect a majority of the time, they simply won't invest the energy to do so.

Was it Gramscii who said something to the effect that people don't understand the world, they just react to it? Feel like it might have been Gramscii. But I'm bounded by how much energy I am willing to spend in verifying whether he said anything remotely of the sort.

 

[Fawlty]

I think the abnormal people are the ones who try to use evidence and logic to examine their beliefs. Most people, even most high-functioning, intelligent people, use something like "trust the experts and experience" as the basis for the vast majority of their beliefs, including their deepest, most-treasured ones. There's little difference in the process between people for whom "trust the experts" means accepting the climate-science consensus and people for whom it means accepting the truth of Christianity.

I'm not saying that they're equal either in truth value or in how easy it is to prove them. We can look under the hood of climate science, and we can check the results of science generally. But in terms of why people believe them, there is a lot of similarity.

One has a prominent faith mechanism - you saw Rup use it earlier, he's a faithist - and one doesn't.

And it's not as if the faith mechanism only functions like a legitimate appeal to authority (or even a moderately fallacious one). It functions as anything it needs to be at any given time to keep the mask from slipping. There's such a difference there between trust and faith that I do not lend credulity to the idea that otherwise mentally sound people aren't aware of this (and further, there's probably a major, unacknowledged Third-Person Effect happening here, whereby individuals privately know it's hooey but underestimate the degree to which others know it's hooey).

Be back in a few hours.

 

[Jack V Savage]

One has a prominent faith mechanism - you saw Rup use it earlier, he's a faithist - and one doesn't.

And it's not as if the faith mechanism only functions like a legitimate appeal to authority (or even a moderately fallacious one). It functions as anything it needs to be at any given time to keep the mask from slipping. There's such a difference there between trust and faith that I do not lend credulity to the idea that otherwise mentally sound people aren't aware of this.

My point is that "belief" is very complicated and that people don't really have coherent worldviews.

I've had a discussion with @Trotsky about Paul Ryan. I think he deeply, sincerely believes that progressive taxation and the safety net are immoral and that getting rid of them would make everyone better off. The fact that his beliefs are very convenient considering his own social class and the views of his donors and likely post-political employers is not exactly a coincidence, but it doesn't detract from the sincerity of his views. Now, do I think he's willing to fudge or just make bad arguments in the political service of those beliefs? Sure. But the core beliefs are real.

 

[Ruprecht]

I meant grain, not rice by the way. It was late.

And no, again I'll explain this. I'm not "shifting" at all. You wanted me to elaborate on the historical context, and I did. God got kicked out of the universe because we learned there was no god out there. When that happens, when God is no longer the sun or some celestial object, God has to become a more abstract concept, and the trick of faith - an abstraction in its own right - is to substitute itself into every place where people's real experiences and knowledge belie the truth.

You're also not going to pull the old Christian bullshit trick of "you haven't seen it yourself so you don't know." You'd excoriate somebody for applying that in another context. That's ripskater-level nonsense. Again, fallacies and garbage thinking come flying out of you when your faith gets involved. This is very typical of smart people who pretend to believe in God. It's just a flailing extension of The God of the Gaps. If evidence were not causal to belief, we wouldn't have many of our cognitive biases that actively reject evidence.

Tell me more about this "true faith" while you're at it. This mythical, magical beast that is immune to evidence, has no burden of proof, and is true because it is true. (hogwash)

I already granted that Communism has some faith elements, as does any totalitarian ideology I've ever looked at. Doesn't produce great results. Dialectical materialism often starts to look like faith as its abstractions begin to leave behind the material world. It certainly loses its grounding, anyway. On that note, I'll take back what I said about political philosophies being ways of distributing resources etc, because they do tend to leave that behind. The modern Republican Party is an accelerated example of giving objective reality and truth the slip on a massive scale. At least they are trying to explain real things. They do have that going for them, unlike some Abrahamic religions I could mention.

I still maintain that Christians are suspending their disbelief, are aware that faith is phony, and are intentionally going with it anyway. I've described the method (faith), and the motive is readily apparent (religion is very useful socially, and can be jimmy-rigged to be compatible with everyday morality). The best argument that can be made is that these people are merely incredibly stupid, and don't believe in biology, chemistry or physics. I give them more credit. I think that instead of being mentally retarded, they've subtly virtualized the idea of belief, using faith like it's both duct tape and super glue to handle the gaping holes. I think that when confronted with this, they have no choice but to recognize it as true, and I think that process of seeing the truth and burying it happens over and over and over again, throughout their lives- this phenomenon even has a name - it's a test of faith.

Of course there was a shift, you had to admit that your characterisation of faith wasn't true historically. You went from a categorical assertion to a conditional one. Now you have to justify why there's a historical distinction, some arbitrary tipping point in recorded knowledge no doubt.
The fact that you still try and maintain that it's true is simply because you're asserting that all belief is knowledge derived through evidentialism, despite the fact that even a cursory examination of the things you think you "know" would show that's not the case.
It's not just totalitarian ideologues that take things on faith, it's simply a factor of how knowledge is disseminated and beliefs are formed. Let alone allowing for a distinction between genuine belief and knowledge, or interpretive frameworks that are explicitly distinct from evidentialism (such as aesthetics).
That's certainly no less true in the information age, where "what everyone knows" has been amplified, stored, distributed and accessed through the internet. In fact the larger the body of knowledge, the less possible it is to empirically confirm everything for yourself.
There's nothing "magical" about true faith. It's simply the case of strong belief and the impact that belief will have on actions. Not restricted to a religious context either.

 

[Lavalamp]

Why is Floyd saying he wants to box with the eagle