Posts by BenWilson
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Deborah, it's funny you make that 'god of the gaps' point, as it was almost an identical description for philosophy in one text I read - the gaps in our 'firmer' knowledge. Damn that Jap.
We really should just get over the fact that there's a lot of things we don't know, and of that, quite a bit we couldn't anyway.
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Pantheism appeals to me - gods who either don't care, or are not all-powerful, strikes me as less directly contradicted by the existence of evil than the Christian version.
But why bother inventing gods really? The childish comfort of personifying a teddy bear is understandable to a point. After that, when the child insists everyone else talk to the bear, and starts using it as an excuse for naughty actions ("Teddy made me do it", or even worse, "Teddy did it"), then it's time for the bear to be gently, kindly, but firmly removed from the picture.
We deify science and scientists too. There's a few posts here, and I'm guessing Dawkins does it too, that suggest science is not incompatible with religion, because Einstein said so. And that makes religion OK because our other religion doesn't clash with it. I think both science and religion are just frameworks to be treated with skepticism at all times.
Most religions have shown themselves to be capricious and cruel at times. And most scientific theories end up debunked. What has proven useful has often been put to equally capricious and cruel uses as religion. Einstein himself was instrumental in one of the worst examples.
Neither provides us with an infallible moral compass. Religion does not because it slides too easily into dogma, serving evil directly, regardless of whatever noble sentiments it is founded on. Science does not because morality is not really a scientific question. Morals are human inventions, not facts in the world to be discovered. Certainly some facts may show how bad some morals really are, but it doesn't really show why - it can only show how one set of morals practically clashes with another that we may hold more deeply.
I don't claim to know what ideal morality is - I said in the previous post that years of study just showed me 1000 things it ain't. I don't really agree with any of the famous secular ethical theories either - they all come down to dogma in the end - you either accept the basic principles or you don't.
Nor would I say that philosophy is a better arbiter. It concerns itself with many of the same issues as religion but tends to have a logical approach in the western tradition, and some subsections of the eastern. But I've studied enough logic to know that it is every bit as powerful a mechanism for dogma as simple dogma. Ultimately any logical system rests on axioms, and those are where all our problems lie. You can put any case whatsoever, so long as you choose your axioms carefully.
The only superiority I acknowledge to such an approach is that at least the mechanism for moving forwards from the axioms, or refuting illogical systems, is something that most of us can eventually agree on. At least philosophers can sometimes by convinced that their system sucks arse because of some logical fallacy. On the other hand, the insistence on logic can often make them completely incapable of accepting simple intuitive counterexamples that might show a religious person why their religion sucks arse. So swings and roundabouts. I think that Jap was right, that I was really just studying theology and kidding myself I wasn't.
So, <scratches head> I guess I don't know shit. Or more specifically, I don't know good shit, even if I know bad shit when I smoke it.
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You old atheist you. I think it's good to know the arguments for and against God, but I'm yet to meet the believer who cares a fig for argumentation other than as a way of wasting even more of your time.
It seems to me that most philosophical debate about God actually gives the whole foolish concept a lot more time than it deserves, and is actually a rather cunning trap to frame the debate in terms favorable to believers, rather like most modern election campaigns. They seek to crystallize the issue into simple binaries to give the punters a feeling that they have been confronted with a real choice, and when the choice is made, that it had some significance. All of the important issues are thus left to a later date, after the election, wherein a mandate is claimed from that all-important choice, that was never really intended by the punters.
In the end, whether God exists or not, doesn't really change very much at all. We are still actually faced with all the same questions about our codes of behavior. We still don't know how we can come to know God's will, and it is still simply an assertion to follow one set of monotheistic dogma over another. Nothing has actually been settled at all by establishing God's existence. But if you do accept it, a subtle shift is usually made, in that because that is typically a leap of faith, it is tempting to make another one - to trust some church or other.
That is why Christians try so hard to meet all the arguments against God, and to come up with arguments for. It is not to convince anyone that God does indeed exist, logically. It is actually to convince people that it's a huge and complicated debate, with so many facets, and the final decision will always boil down to faith. Even the purely logical can be tempted to make this leap. That way the faithful don't have to feel that they are illogical. It is not aimed at the logical, who are already lost.
And every salesperson knows that once you've convinced someone that it would be good to have a car, it's most likely they'll buy the one you're pushing.
This whole angle became very clear to me as a philosophy undergraduate when I was sinking piss in Shadows with a Japanese professor. We got on to the subject of religion somehow, and it became clear to me that he didn't so much not believe in God as not care. That I professed to be an atheist didn't convince him at all. He said that I must have a deeply religious motivation to waste so much time on such a simple question, whatever my conclusions were. He continued to tease me about being religious every time I saw him from then on. I think he had a good point. I did waste a lot of time on God.
Actually, studying philosophy, I wasted a lot of time, period. My only consolation is that, as Edison would say, I now know 1000 ways *not* to make intellectual progress, which is progress of a kind.
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Reece....<sniff, wipe away tears> that was beautiful.
Does it help to know that at least one poor techo misses his christmas holiday to help stop your inbox bursting at it's spam-seams?
My ditty:
Boxing day
Coding, yay!Chocolate snax
Desperate haxDesign dilemmas
Coffee tremorsNew Years?
Boss staresRelease day
Relaxing jBugphone rings
and rings.... -
Season's Greetings to all.
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Great NZ Holiday? Bah, humbug.
One of the downsides of working for northern hemisphereans is that when they are snowed under and cold, they want us to feel the same, and product release that I'm working on is set to 3rd January.
Seriously.
For all those customers who feel that the best thing to do when they get back from Christmas/New Years break is to install a whole new mail, antivirus and antispam system.
I could understand if they'd actually made it Christmas itself, at least only poor quadruple timing techos would be affected by a few days instability. But the day when everyone gets back to work?
Anyone else out there on the Christmas gyp-list?
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The high false negative rate is encouraging. Now all I need to do is look square and I'll get away with anything. Business as usual.
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Paul, are fags, booze and fatty foods restricted?
How many stoners are there on the road? You seem very confident, but as you say, there are no roadside tests to either confirm or deny your assertion.
Which is actually a part of the reason I'm not totally against this testing. At least we'll start to get some real statistics. If it's found that large proportions of stoners are driving, and yet they aren't overrepresented in the accident statistics, then that will completely debunk what you are saying. Or not. At least there will be some facts.
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Terence, practice makes perfect! I'm getting sub-second error by counting heartbeats. But would my heart be racing if some cop was breathing down my neck?
The old mississippi count eh? Surely the error gets worse as the numbers take longer to say. 'Twenty-seven mississippi'. Perhaps that's where your 3 seconds comes from. Just repeat one to ten again maybe? Personally I found myself getting tongue tied eventually from the constant repetition, as the tongue gets tired of executing the same motions. Or were you 'subvocalizing'?
I'm thinking a well known song would be better, since the timing is already established. The last stanza of 'Stairway to Heaven' takes about 30 seconds, if you go from 'And as we wind on down the road' to 'to be a rock and not to roll'. Don't include the musical riff at the end of every line. If you do, stop at 'the tune will come to you at last'. Which is kind of poetic for the purpose, and I think the lines might have a calming effect too. The lady we all know will show us the way with her shining white light.
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For pupil dilation, there's a really easy way to beat that one. Look at the sun for a few seconds, or the cops headlights if it's night. Open your eyes really wide when you're doing it.
For the other tests it could be fun to act ESL and ask the copper to show you what he means. He could be up for a blood test himself.
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