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PTR
10.2.5
PTR
10.2.6
Creation according to the Bible.
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Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
865056
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
In answer to your question about love's existence beyond that initial fire? That's any number of things: Social expectation; duty; family; companionship; and, most of all,
habit
-- when your body forms a bond with a specific person without whom you couldn't do, it no longer needs those specific chemicals. That fact doesn't make love impossible to analyse. When your body forms a particularly strong bond with alcohol or tobacco, it's incredibly difficult to break that habit if you actually want to. Difference? Love isn't necessarily harmful. Can be, though.
You are listing the effects of love, and not doing a very good job of it. I'm not asking you to list the effects of love, or the long term effects of love. I'm asking you to provide evidence of love's existence. Would you accept the existence of God if I pointed out how long his creation has existed? I highly doubt it. You would want direct evidence of God Himself, not just
what I claimed was the effects
. Either you must dismiss the existence of love, even though you and I both know it exists, or accept the existence of love, and provide evidence of it, which you cant. This is my illustration for how irrational it is to dismiss the existence of God based on lack of evidence.
I think we are that shallow. When I'm focusing on a math problem, I'm not loving anything, I'm just doing math. I think when someone loves something, they do it generally, not 100% actively and consistently. If we were to lose our "love chemicals," we won't feel love. It's just the way we're put together.
You're right, love is hard to prove. Maybe it can't be proved. However, that doesn't mean there isn't evidence for it.
Wow. I think I may have really stumbled on something here. Neither of you really understand love. Go to a rest home. Watch a husband watching his wife die. Watch a baby be born. Join a paramedic unit and respond to the scenes of car crashes, where you see dead kids and inconsolable parents. Tell them that it is simply a 'chemical reaction' in their head, or that they will get in the 'habit' of not having that child around.
If this is truly what you feel love is, then brace yourself. You haven't lived.
Back to the topic at hand: Love is an idea. You can't prove it exists. We can see effects of what we believe to be love, but we can't truly define love. We can't define 'time', either. We can't even define 'life' very well. We have characteristics for life that are generally agreed upon, but that hardly satisfies the question of what it is. These things are elusive. When you discover the difficulty of defining them, you'll discover the difficulty of deciding whether they are truly exist. I mean, what is time? Do you know? You know what entropy is, but what is time itself? How does it function? Not how you perceive it, but how does it consistently function throughout the universe, or even, does it? These are concepts that each one of you (looking at you asakawa) rely on, on a minute by minute basis, but there is no empirical evidence that any of these things exist beyond that of a vague idea, or learned perceptions. But you need them. You rely on them. They are the foundations of everything you understand. Every action in your day is built on things that you have no evidence of. Yet, here, when faced with something as seemingly important as the concept of a creator, you dismiss it as baseless due to lack of evidence.
You are being deliberately obtuse.Your judgmental predisposition to being critical of me blinds you to my intent and my meaning. If you insist on despising everything I say, then everything I post will seem 'obtuse' to you, regardless of the content. I assure you, Sinespe, your efforts against me will continue to end in your frustration. The unspeakable alternative is you accept a mutually beneficial, amicable, and enjoyable conversation. Try it.
Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
I'm not asking you to list the effects of love, or the long term effects of love. I'm asking you to provide evidence of love's existence.
Not even responding, just quoting for absurdity.Then you are reported, and will be for as long as you cannot remain on topic and play nice.
Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
What is there to respond to in that? You're asking for evidence, but a nebulous kind of non-scientific evidence -- rejecting all else presented. It's pointless.
Imagine this attitude turned back on you, only in defense of the existence of God. Imagine I wanted you to take
what I perceived
as the effects of God as the existence of God, and then called you obtuse and absurd and non scientific, if you didn't. There is no empirical evidence for either God or love. These things are
what you perceive
as effects of love.
Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
No, in the case of the chemicals they are quantifiable by scientific testing; in the case of socio-economic factors, they are quantifiable by socio-economics. They aren't the perceptions of individuals; they are the observations of bodies of robust analysis.
/sigh
Yeah. The chemicals exist. Those are measurable. They are scientific. I get that. But, are they caused by love? I'm sure worshiping in Church arouses some chemicals in people's brain, but you wouldn't accept that as proof of God, why should it be proof of love?
Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
But, are they caused by love?
I've ... already explained this. Correlation and causation with chemical reactions is pretty simple to test, and it has been done to death.
I guess that settles it then.
Post by
91278
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
MyTie
It does. Thank you. You can stop the false analogy now, can't you?
California and coffee again?
Post by
asakawa
The phrase "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." clearly means,
come back to me when you've got a reason for me to even consider this
and you know that. The whole point behind the 'flying spaghetti monster' or the 'orbital teapot' is to demonstrate why we dismiss that which is asserted without evidence. Everyone here does this with every religion they don't believe in. We dismiss Norse gods or Greek gods (though we enjoy the stories very much!).
Have you dismissed the possibility of life on other planets? How about a cure for cancer? What about love? The next time someone tells you that they love you, you should dismiss them, because there is no physical evidence for the existence of love.
I find it amazing how quickly people dismiss things they don't want to acknowledge as possible, with the excuse that they have no evidence for it, but at the same time, base their lives on that which there is no evidence for.
God is as real as love. We have evidence of neither, but both are more powerful and valuable than you can possibly imagine.
You quoted me but didn't address my point.
So do you dismiss Norse and Greek mythology as myth? Do you think Thor and Athena exist? Do you believe Joseph Smith was a prophet? Do you believe Xenu is an intergalactic warlord? Some people believe (or believed) those things for the same reason you believe your thing. Why are you correct and they wrong?
I'm trying to get across the point that you're an atheist to everything except the thing you believe in. We are both joined in atheism of the flying spaghetti monster. There's far, far more that we both believe to be untrue than you believe to be true and I don't. Why is this one special? Why are all the Hindus wrong?
Post by
MyTie
You quoted me but didn't address my point.
So do you dismiss Norse and Greek mythology as myth? Do you think Thor and Athena exist? Do you believe Joseph Smith was a prophet? Do you believe Xenu is an intergalactic warlord? Some people believe (or believed) those things for the same reason you believe your thing. Why are you correct and they wrong?
I'm trying to get across the point that you're an atheist to everything except the thing you believe in. We are both joined in atheism of the flying spaghetti monster. There's far, far more that we both believe to be untrue than you believe to be true and I don't. Why is this one special? Why are all the Hindus wrong?
I do dismiss them, yes, because I don't believe in them, based on my observations of life, and study of those religions. It has nothing to do with lack of evidence. I would understand if you dismissed creationism because you don't believe in it based on your observations, and personal beliefs. That makes sense to me. Dismissing based on lack of evidence is either being counter-intuitive to the way we live, or being hyper scientific toward something that isn't scientific, or perhaps both.
Post by
asakawa
So your belief in that one thing has nothing to do with the geography of where you were born and raised or the family you were raised by then? Because for most believers that's very clearly the important factor in which religion they follow.
"Observations and personal beliefs". Your personal beliefs (or rather "one's" personal beliefs) are acquired through one's life from people and experiences. Observations can't be trusted. People see things that aren't there all the time or else simple confirmation bias explains a lot and we can all be guilty of it.
Understanding the fallibility of human beings and the biasses of institutions is what led me to look to scientific method and critical thinking. In science a single well-run experiment is always looked at with scepticism until it can be replicated and confirmed. No single person or group is expected to do good science on their own, it's all a process designed to remove the human fallibility.
If I saw god tomorrow my first reaction would not be to go to church it would be to go to a psychiatrist. I'm a single fallible creature.
Post by
OverZealous
Wow. I think I may have really stumbled on something here.
Neither of you really understand love
. Go to a rest home. Watch a husband watching his wife die. Watch a baby be born. Join a paramedic unit and respond to the scenes of car crashes, where you see dead kids and inconsolable parents. Tell them that it is simply a 'chemical reaction' in their head, or that they will get in the 'habit' of not having that child around.
If this is truly what you feel love is, then brace yourself. You haven't lived.
But what makes you certain that
you
"understand" love? Because in all honesty, there is no reason that what you consider love to be actually is true love. Indeed, it may very well be nothing but chemical reactions, and it very well may not.
Anyone can claim that others don't understand something based on their own opinions and beliefs, but it doesn't make them right to anyone but themselves.
Furthermore, you state that we cannot truly define love - yet you are making a statement that (to me, I may have misunderstood your entire post - I'm feeling both ill and tired) implies that
you
can in fact understand love. How can you understand something that you cannot even define? Are you saying that you feel that
you
understand what
you
consider love to be, or are you contradicting yourself?
Post by
588688
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
gamerunknown
How's this MyTie: your wife's love is real for you and you can live your life on the assumption that it exists. Oh, another
Chomsky
vid.
When you claim that everyone else has to alter their life substantially due to the fact that your wife loves you, we're going to want logical reasons why we should alter our life (seems like a non-sequitur) and evidence that everyone can accept that demonstrates that your wife loves you. If you don't think chemicals or sociological factors count as evidence for love, then there are no factors that everyone can accept.
Popper said atomic theory was a good example of a theory that was not falsifiable when it was first proposed by Democritus (IIRC), since he didn't have the means of disproof available to him. The scientific thing to do would be to dismiss the theory. That doesn't mean it is impossible and he can continue living his life on the assumption that all matter is made up of atoms. In fact, as was the case, it turned out that we learned that all matter is made of atoms (apart from dark matter, perhaps). In this case, God may exist, but it is beyond the purview of falsifiable science at the moment.
To a child, they may think that makes it impossible, but we know nothing is impossible really (law of simple enumeration), it's just some things have more evidence and produce more consistent results (predictive power is a good test of a theory - we'll ignore post-modernistic relativism here for convenience). For example, as far as I'm aware, prayer has not allowed anyone to consistently contact a person across a continent.
Anyway, I think children should be taught the "is/ought" distinction (so they don't fall into the trap of believing in Social Darwinism, whether religious or not), the problem of simple enumeration, why parsimony should be used for scientific research (using a null hypothesis: if there are no conditions where the null hypothesis can't be true, the study is begging the question. If there is insufficient evidence for the experimental hypothesis, we accept the null hypothesis). They can also learn to distinguish between the lay definition of a theory and the scientific use of theory, where empirical evidence is obtained (sometimes through experimentation, sometimes through other observations) to support a hypothesis.
I also think children should be taught creationism in comparative religion. I'm not sure which the most neutral way of going about it would be: perhaps starting with the majority religion in the country (Christianity in the US, with Catholicism being the largest sect). Catholics believe that humans are the only creatures with souls, but other than that, they're permitted to believe in old universe evolution. There is less difficulty with Catholics because their views can't diverge too far from the Church or they'll be excommunicated. Then we go onto the next sect, which is probably Methodists or Baptists, which have slightly more divergent views, then perhaps Judaism, Islam, JW, Mormonism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Taoism, non-believers (perhaps finding a local representative to question would be useful too). They should also get an opportunity to read the holy text independently. Otherwise the fairest way to go would be worldwide: which is IIRC: Christianity, lack of religion, Islam, Hinduism.
Post by
Adamsm
Oh ya, I forgot about that. Don't know why.....that demons are not just christian I mean, I didn't forget that ghosts were from other religions at least. But it's still odd that people who are "possessed" react negatively to christian/catholic holy objects specifically. No doubt there are cases though of demonic possessions where holy objects from other religions had an effect on said "demons".Because.....any possession you see on TV/Movies is really fake? And as Christianity/Catholicism is big in Hollywood, that's why it happens like that, even if it's a Mountain Demon of Tibet which in all honesty should be laughing it's ass off at some little priest waving a cross at it's face?
And, because of all the paranormal stuff, I can't support atheism. That and the fact that life itself just seems too perfectly designed to have not have had anything to do with some external sentient entity. And that it also seems wierd to me that all living organisms supposedly spawned from a "primordial ooze of lifeless crap". But evolution makes so much sense as well, so I just don't know what to believe./blink What? Atheism is about not believing in the religious beings, and has nothing to do with the supernatural; my madre is a border line atheist, but she still believes hard core in a wide variety of supernatural things.
Oh and aliens, all the evidence supporting aliens, from what I know of christianity, there is nothing in the christian bible that talks of alien life, and most christians as far as I know don't believe in alien life and think that all life exists on earth and earth only.
Most religions don't talk about aliens...because you know, when they were founded, the idea that we weren't alone in the universe was non-existent. Now, about the only one that does talk them is Scientology, but as that was founded by a writer well.....(and a large number of really out there people).
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