Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (34)

A semantic dispute over "rationality" isn't the issue. As I've said before, I have no emotional attachment to random strings of vowels and consonants so will happily pick a new word if I get to define it myself. So it's pretty irrelevant.

The question is; why would you want to specifically take religions off the menu when it comes to RW trashing them? Why one type of belief and not an other?

Why would you consider faith - that is, acceptance of an idea despite, and increasingly because of, the lack of evidence - a virtue and part of this "rationalism"?

This probably answers the question. Science tends to hold evidence as the highest authority. After all, how can you say something about the universe if you haven't actually looked at the universe? So faith - that is, having an idea without evidence - can be damaged by science. It would be akin to saying "Armondikov has ginger hair" without making any attempt to actually figure out if that statement is actually true. But not only that, but because faith can be damaged by observation, you will start making excuses about why you can't find that out and eventually pushing and pushing and pushing until you've defined it in such a way that you can't make the observation and then try to limit what others can do answer your question. This is exactly what is happening when you try to shield religion from science.

We used to think we could never fly, or go faster than 10 mph, or land on the moon. The thing is, no one can predict the future (I know this because I can't and am pretty convinced no one has mental faculties I don't posses) so once you start making hard-and-fast decisions about what can't be done, someone will throw egg on your face when they do it. So perhaps we will be able to prove there is no God one day, as I don't see that hypothesis as any different to disproving that he made the world 6000 years ago. All the excuses otherwise are just special pleading.