Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Probably it doesn't always appear to be so, but for me people's beliefs, philosophical commitments, life stories, etc. are absolutely distinct from their mundane existence, behaviour of the moment, life situation at hand. In terms of world view, Sam Harris is a mind-control-advocating irrational anti-religious extremist militant fundie.

Quote from: ersi on 2014-08-14, 12:46:35

Probably it doesn't always appear to be so, but for me people's beliefs, philosophical commitments, life stories, etc. are absolutely distinct from their mundane existence, behaviour of the moment, life situation at hand. In terms of world view, Sam Harris is a mind-control-advocating irrational anti-religious extremist militant fundie.

Perhaps I disagree with your largely irrational assessment of Sam Harris? For instance, if we're all puppets then Harris is one too; it's rather illogical to conclude that he would be a puppeteer instead.

That being said, even if I mostly agreed with you I don't really see how it affects anything. I argued that he was correct about some part or most of the Bible being immoral or something along those lines; it was a while ago. That doesn't mean he's a "Good Guy". It means he's correct about something. Even Mohammed must've been right once or twice in the Qur'an.

This is all okay, except that without a moral basis or standard you cannot coherently assess anything as moral or immoral. Still, nothing can stop you from doing it incoherently.

My favourite part of Qur'an is Sura 18, The Cave. Yours? (If it isn't too odd to ask an atheist's favourite parts of the Bible and Qur'an...)

I readily believe that JS's emotional attitude plays out as slick social competence in his daily life, but this won't change the fact that his typed expression stands no logical scrutiny. He's like an ID evangelist who learned the wrong material and now blindly spreads the gospel.

However, I quite disliked the Qur'an. I thought it was derivative, tedious and repulsive. One of the most repulsive parts was Mohammed's reaction to some Jews pointing out how he was messing up and corrupting their stories — something immediately obvious to any reader even vaguely familiar with the Tanakh.

...I looked into the stars and saw them as nature's machines--churning out the life-giving ingredients of life, I looked into a dust cloud and saw the lightening-quick fundamental bits of all things working together as ants building a colony.  Then, I had the sudden realization that the entire universe was itself a real living thing and it was at that moment that I felt and heard the universe heave a big sigh. 

I had a tremendous sense of awe that broke the spell of my meditation, causing me to open my eyes and stare blankly into space.  My first awake thought was that I was a part of this living universe, made of the exact same stuff, unable to be destroyed and in that sense, immortal--

Was that mystical or was I slowly putting things together in a different light?  I had no sense of anything divine, it was simply a stimulating insight--

Derivative as in borrowing from the Tanakh? But this should not have come as a surprise, unpleasant or otherwise. Messing up and corrupting the Jewish stories? If you believe in heavily crooked revisory history of the Bible, as atheists normally do, then isn't the Tanakh itself already a corruption and derivation of e.g. the Babylonian mythology?

I find some derivative works extremely useful, such as Zohar compared to Tanakh.

isn't the Tanakh itself already a corruption and derivation of e.g. the Babylonian mythology?

The Qur'an emanates a special kind of insufferable glib superiority while proclaiming inanities. That, I imagine, is what you call the style. I happen to find it repugnant.

Right, style is a matter of taste. My view is that style is something you simply have to tolerate. Patiently suffering the inevitable just might lead you to the valuable kernel

In other news, Robert Grosseteste's De Luce (c. 1225) has been translated into English, and scientists are amazed at how a writing by a theologian, authored centuries before Newton, could propose something like gravity, and even more centuries before the Big Bang theory, could speak of the origin of the universe as if an explosion, and even more centuries before field and string theories, could describe the fundamentals of the universe in mathematical terms.

The usual saying goes that the Middle Ages were dark, but it very much looks like these days are much darker.

I'd never actually heard the term "dark ages" before I learned English.

Btw, I don't know what "scientists" you refer to, but it sounds like they have just about zero historical sense. --- What did the scientists, if any, actually say?

Grosseteste's De Luce, available in English since the 1940s, opens by addressing a problem with classical atomism: why, if atoms are point-like, do materials have volume? Light is discussed as a medium for filling space. Grosseteste’s recognition that matter’s bulk and bulk stability requires subtle explanation was impressive. Even more intriguing was his use of mathematics to illuminate his physics.

A finite volume, he writes, emerges from an "infinite multiplication of light" acting on infinitesimal matter. He draws an analogy to the finite ratio of two infinite sums, claiming that (1+2+4+8+...)/(0.5+1+2+4+...) is equal to 2. He does not articulate carefully the idea of the limits one needs to make this rigorous, but we know what he means[...]

In an impressive final stroke of unification, he postulates that towards the centre of the cosmos, the remaining unperfected matter becomes so dense and the inwardly radiating lumen so weak, that no further perfection transitions are possible. He thus accounts for the Aristotelian distinction between the perfect heavens and the imperfect Earth and atmosphere.

To our knowledge, De Luce is the first worked example showing that a single set of physical laws might account for the very different structures of the heavens and Earth, hundreds of years before Newton’s 1687 appeal to gravity to unite the falling of objects on Earth with the orbiting of the Moon. [...]

The possible existence of more than one universe was indeed a live issue of the period, and a highly contentious one — appearing, for example, in the Papal edict of 1277 that banned a list of scientific teachings. But it was a debate that Grosseteste apparently chose to avoid.

We live in troubled times.
I would never be brave enough to say anything negative about Islam or its holy book.
Seriously.

[…] it makes me wonder how one gets to be a scientist without any basic reading of historical texts. We have internet at our fingertips, but those so-called scientists fail to look up every once in a while whose theories they are poorly mimicking. We would have been spared some reinventions of the wheel, or at least the reinvention would go faster.

There's nothing new under the sun. All scriptures say this in some form. How does one get to be a scientist without knowing this?
(underlining added)

Of course, ESP and telekinesis, ghosts and past lives, and mind-reading is -like- for sure, really, like, real. Ya know?

It's hard to be more ridiculously self-contradictory than you already are, but I'm sure you can do better.

In words of sage Kapila, devotion and knowledge are not contradictory. They are mutually supportive. The same way, I don't see nothing in science to exclude religion and nothing in religion to exclude science. Instead, science and religion provide proper perspective to each other.

With such false dichotomies, James, how do you reconcile your meditation experiences with sciences? It looks like you don't do it at all. You don't care about such reconciliations, because you don't even see the conflict, even though you dispute and argue as if conflicts were all over.

They certainly are not mutually supportive.  Religion can make room for science and will even make concessions to science, but science can never make room for any kind of religion because of its controversial and non-falsifiable supernatural nature.

"You don't care about such reconciliations", au contraire, mon ami!

I have thought much of this apparently mystical revelation and have concluded that it was not a veridical experience of God and therefore, not at all a hint of a supernatural realm...

Your predictable comeback will be that even though science has uncovered physical or psychological mechanisms...

Inferior in the scientific sense, mind you, because they miss at least half of the phenomenally describable reality.