Essay talk:A Rational Approach to Dealing with Religion and Society

HEY! YOU! 'I'm not interested in a point-for-point debate over the [other] article' - PFoster

Let me see if I get this straight: There are some folks who claim to be "inspired" by their superstitions to do good things. And thus we must not say that a non-physical entity aka "god" interacting with the physical world blatantly violates the basic principles of modern science?? How's that supposed to be rational? --Rational Thinker 15:37, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Let me explain this to you. Read the damn essay, Rational Thinker. I AGREE that religion is not rational. Where I break with you is that I don't see that as a reason to crap all over people and the way they choose to make sense of a difficult, nebulous, painful, unjust life. Where is it written that the entire realm of human experience can or should be reduced to that which can be codified rationally? I'm not interested in your simple dichotomies and your simplistic, took-an-intro-level-course-to-critical-thinking-in-college-and think-I-can-pontificate-about-what-people-should-believe explanations of the world. What I AM interested in is how people create explanations for their often shitty realities and then craft tools that help them transcend, resist, adapt to, and live those realities. What I'm interested in is the way people live, and, like it or not, and even it defies your smug attitude, religion has been, is, and in all likelihood will continue to be an important part of the ways in which people try to understand and better their situations - as well as a tool used against those same people to keep them in their place. Complicated, eh? Complex, huh? Difficult to explain in black-and-white terms, no? That's what history and sociology and anthropology and the rest of the humanities and social sciences are about, Rational Thinker - respectfully engaging with the complex narratives that define human existence. Not shitting all over real human beings because they choose to be other than the exquisitely rational type of person that you are. PFoster 16:18, 27 January 2008 (EST)

May I simply say, pwnt. Good work, PFoster - I'm stirred by your example to write an irrational counterpoint to our rational friend. --מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

*Standing ovations*. Thank you, PFoster. Full agreement from here. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 16:31, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I would also be impressed if the essay actually addressed the series of points made in the article to which it responds.--Bob^{bing up} 16:43, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I'm not interested in a point-for-point debate over the article because the question I'm interested in is not "is it true that religion is a series of stories that people have told and tell themselves?," but in the social and political contexts and consequences of those stories - and the social and political roles that those stories play. My response to the essay - most of which seems to be cribbed from Hitchens and Dawkins and the other usual suspects is to find it all pretty obvious. There's not much there that hasn't been said on this wiki and elsewhere many, many times. What I'm getting at is that calling people's narratives and understandings "bullshit," as you do, does NOTHING to help me understand those actual, living, breathing, struggling human beings. Nor does it help me understand how the same sort of beliefs are used against them. Let me be clear, I'm not a religious guy, and i don't spend a lot of my time thinking about life beyond the material plane - it's fairly irrelevant to my own life. But I also understand how and why it's critical to other people's lives. Hugely critical. And calling something of that magnitude in a real person's life "bullshit" is an attitude that i find both morally distasteful and intellectually lazy. PFoster 16:56, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I see, I thought you were going to respond to the individual issues raised when you wrote I'm working on an essay that deals with some of the issues raised in this one here.Drop by and give me your thoughts.... but if this is something else then that's fine.--Bob^{bing up} 17:14, 27 January 2008 (EST)

*Gets up, applauds* Bravo, PFoster, bravo! -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 16:57, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I agree, PFoster. I too, struggle to understand people, and their natures, not as simple caricatures of delusion, but as human beings. -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 17:01, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Very nice, BUT: there is no way around the fact that most religions are not compatible with modern science. Basic principles like the conservation of energy exclude the possibility of supernatural entities acting on the physical universe. If people want to reject the evidence provided by their senses, fine with me. People have speculated for millennia that what we see, hear and feel might not be real. From a purely logical point of view, we indeed cannot know if the world we see is real or just an illusion. But one should be upfront about it. Claiming to agree with science on the one hand and then postulating things that contradict it on the other hand strikes me as against reason (which is quite different from "not explainable by reason, but not contradicting it"). --Rational Thinker 17:06, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Tell me; how much of the article did you actually read? He's not addressing that.--מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

Right. And again I say, "so what?" Science is incompatible with religion. You win the Nobel Prize for Obvious Arguments. My beef is not about whether or not there's a god or how belief in such a thing contradicts the laws of science. My beef is about your attitude towards people, and your pseudo-intellectual smugness in dismissing critical parts of the human experience as "bullshit." PFoster 17:18, 27 January 2008 (EST)

It's starting to look as though we're talking at cross purposes. I had assumed this was supposed to be a response to the issues raised in the first essay. If it's meant to defend religion from another perspective then that's a different issue.--Bob^{bing up} 17:16, 27 January 2008 (EST)

So Conservapedia blatnatly distorting science to suit their wrold view would be perfectly fine, except that you don't like their world view? Is that what you're trying to say? --Rational Thinker 17:28, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Jesus Christ, RT, will you stop and think about what PFoster is actually saying? -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 17:34, 27 January 2008 (EST)

sigh. What I'm trying to say is that a reducing a social/political/historical category like religion down to one thing, be it CP's ridiculous lines of argument or the "I Have a Dream" speech does not allow us to understand what religion is or how it works as an agent of power, change and resistance. And that passing judgment and calling it "bullshit," in my view, does nothing to help us understand how and why people use those ideas in their lives, and what the political implications of that are. It's not a question of CP being "perfectly fine." It's a question of how and why that happens, what that means, and what people do with that. I'm afraid I can't explain it any more simply than that.PFoster 17:36, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Just watch, though. He'll be coming along in a bit to tell you how believing in a magic man in the sky is against science!!! --מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

Whoo, witty. For the "I Have a Dream" speech, throw out the references to god, and it works just the same. So what's the point? Religion is certainly an interesting phenomenon, and if people want to live in a fantasy world because they can't stand the world as it is, fine, but why not admit it? --Rational Thinker 17:56, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Actually there does seem to be broad agreement that religion is irrational. Indeed, apart from the title I'm not quite quite sure what actual issues (if any) in the first essay are being disputed.--Bob^{bing up} 17:59, 27 January 2008 (EST)

'if people want to live in a fantasy world because they can't stand the world as it is, fine, but why not admit it' - way to completely misrepresent religion. It's not meant to be easy. --מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

Now that's a convincing argument: "that's too complicated for you to understand". --Rational Thinker 18:05, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I think the point, and the central message of the essay, is this: "...a rational approach to an intellectual challenge is to try to understand the challenge for what it is - not to cherrypick the parts that are easy to attack while ignoring the things that do a little more - or a lot more - to complicate your reading and your argument." --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 18:07, 27 January 2008 (EST)

OK, but if some parts of the idea are, as you say, easy to attack doesn't that imply there is a fundamental problem with the idea?--Bob^{bing up} 18:10, 27 January 2008 (EST)

In other words, it does contradict physical evidence, but since it's an immensely complicated matter which occasionally has made positive things happen, it somehow becomes acceptable to contradict the evidence. Cool! --Rational Thinker 18:14, 27 January 2008 (EST)

RT, show me one place where I argue that it's "acceptable to contradict the evidence." PFoster 18:16, 27 January 2008 (EST)

No, RT... the general idea which we are laboriously trying to convey here is that, if I may wax eloquent for a moment, it does not particularly advance the cause of human understanding in any meaningful way to keep hammering away at this minute part of the greater phenomenon of religion. It does not help you to understand neither the phenomenon itself, nor the human beings who are an inseparable part of it. It only serves to reinforce your own world view by establishing a contitutive Other - and a mostly fictional one, at that. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 18:21, 27 January 2008 (EST)

YEEEAAAAAAAAH user blocking is still the best argument! WELCOME TO CONSERVAPEDIA RELOADED! --RT 18:22, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Note that the block was only for five minutes, Rational Thinker, and I purposely didn't block your IP address. Nor have I removed your comment. If this was "CONSERVAPEDIA RELOADED" (as you so lamely put in all caps), the page would have been locked, then your username and IP blocked for infinity, and your comment reverted. None of which happened. Also note that blocking you for 4.5 minutes doesn't do much do disrupt the flow of conversation on a wiki. It is common for some users take that long to respond anyways. Your block was intended as a mild reprimand, for being a bit an ass. -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 18:48, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Blocks

I don't think those blocks add much to the debate RA. And, yes, I did notice that you blocked yourself as well.--Bob^{bing up} 18:24, 27 January 2008 (EST)

All in the spirit of fairness! -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 18:32, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I blocked RT because he was being willfully unthoughtful. Not wanting to act unilaterally, I asked Interpreted if I could block RT, and I would have refrained from doing so had he said no. So it's all Interpreted's fault! :-) -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 18:32, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I think it is exceptionally bad policy to block someone with whom you were having a debate. It's an implied threat about longer term consequences. The fact that someone on your "side" of the debate agreed with you, if anything, makes it worse.--Bob^{bing up} 18:34, 27 January 2008 (EST)

"Implied" is meaningless, because I would never block him again, or for a longer period. I am well aware that after this block, RT will simply continue reading what he wants into PFoster's arguments (aka being an ass), and I will never pointlessly block him again. In case none of you have noticed, I am not a Conservapedian, and if you want to read an implied threat into that block, then read away. But it ain't there. -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 18:48, 27 January 2008 (EST)

I agree that is very bad form to block someone in the middle of a debate you are involved in. Whether RT is listening, or gives a shit about other's ideas or not, is irrelevant, he's not name-calling or trolling or anything blockable. He's just being irrational, without realizing it. human 20:03, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Oh, and by the way, the last time this happened (HoG blocked BobM similarly, in the heat of a debate), the offending sysop was promoted to regular editor on the ground of abusing the blocking function. I don't know if this is the place to discuss it, but something similar might be in order here. human 20:04, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Noting this apology, I rescind my talk of de-sysopship. Our radioactive friend stepped up and made a formal apology, and in a timely fashion (ie, pretty much right away). I hope our rational friend's feelings/thoughts were not overly bruised and heal soon. human 20:13, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Note that the block that I recommended was a one-second lulz block, and I did not have sexual relations with that woman.--מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

not sure of a good header title

"if people want to live in a fantasy world because they can't stand the world as it is, fine, but why not admit it?"

There is extreme arrogance in the implicit claim here - that the writer knows what "the world as it is" is. The philosophical objections to that stance are as easy to pull together as a quickie blast at "all religion" for being irrational.

So I ask: what is "the world as it is"? Please don't leave any phenomena out.

Side note: I find it hilarious for me to be in this particular position in these discussions given my world views and "belief" system. human 20:08, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Ah, but it is exactly that world view that leads you to this position. If that is a paradox, so much the better. :-) --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 20:24, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Haha, no, you're right, and put it very succinctly, yes, thank you. human 21:05, 27 January 2008 (EST)

Science itself (via quantum mechanics) has cast serious doubt on local realism (Wikipedia's article on that subject still sucks but I'll link to it anyway). This is getting pretty close to the boundary of science and philosophy, and maybe theology too, so you know that somebody is gonna be pissed off in any extended discussion of it. Ultimately, I guess that's what wikis are for :-)--Bayes^update 15:58, 28 January 2008 (EST)

Also, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. --מְתֻרְגְּמָן ^{שְׁלֹום}

Among many ideas. I trust that you all have a good running atart on my unsubstantiated "philosophical objections" claim, 'cause I sure as hell don't want to revisit those hardcore undergrad dazezes and try to explain them, since I doubt I understand them anymore! human 21:10, 28 January 2008 (EST)