Phi for All

I'm not saying this is what happened, but is there a chance that these people, being atheists and hopefully rational thinkers, offered up reasons to support why they thought your faith was ridiculous (don't answer that yet, two-part question)? And you, being religious at the time and armed mostly with emotional appeals, doctrine full of contradictions and errors, and an abiding faith that absolutely won't allow you to be wrong about your religion, is there a chance you perceived that criticism as ridicule? And because it's about your faith, it feels like it's about you. So here are these atheists, seemingly mocking you personally, but it might be that they were just using their knowledge of the natural world to explain where your doctrine failed the reality test, or to point out that strong faith means accepting a single explanation about a phenomenon without question even though you can't possibly know something like that. Some folks believe in hundreds of gods, some in just one. Atheists think everything makes more sense with one fewer than that.

I fixed that for you with big, bold brackets, so you wouldn't be strawmanning Strange, and because it's obvious you knew that's what he was really asking, since you're smart.

Personally, I've recognized this inclination to homogenize political characters as a poor response to specific situations. I'm not sure where this need to paint everyone with the same crazy paint comes from. I thought it was a tactic of the US media, and their heroic efforts to make all perspectives valid and available 24/7, but you watch Canadian news, right? Implying that any of the Democrat presidential candidates since the internet would have the same kind of trouble Carson is in right now? You're gonna get a hernia with a stretch like that.

The mind-cloud seems to be God. I had both those things happen to me (multiple times), without God, and I see evolution everywhere.

This is the kind of stupid thing he's probably been corrected on a thousand times ("Uh, Ben, you don't need to seal grain hermetically in the dry desert, certainly not on that scale"), but it's something he made up rather than learned, so he just keeps saying it/lying about it to anyone uneducated enough to listen. And there are so many of those! The kind of people who cheer him when he says/lies that having a Muslim president is incompatible with the Constitution. Aren't there any Republicans out there who are ashamed that this guy is your strongest candidate so far?

It's not a matter of taking it. Evidence needs to be reviewed, compared in context. You can't refuse to offer support for your statements because you don't think someone will accept your evidence. You just need to present it. With this many people involved, nobody is going to be able to reject it out of hand if it doesn't deserve to be.

I think the objection is an emotional one, based on the seeming injustice of letting scientists decide what constitutes the evidence they base their conclusions on. Or it could be a healthy misunderstanding of what's meant by "the scientific community" and how standards of evidence are treated among so many.

The bakery told this couple immediately that they wouldn't make them a cake because it was for a same-sex marriage. Nothing about the actual cake was discussed, it might have been as simple as putting two grooms on top of an everyday wedding cake, so this was a decision to NOT do business with a couple because they're gay. About the same time, another bakery in the area was asked by a customer to make a bible-shaped cake with anti-gay slogans and hateful sentiments written on it. The bakery offered to make the cake, but declined to write the hate messages. They offered to provide the frosting tubes so the client could write it themselves, but the client refused and took the case to the Civil Rights Commission, claiming discrimination because of faith. The board ruled in favor of the bakery. Interestingly, the guy who wanted the bible cake continues to claim he was discriminated against, and now claims he only wanted bible verses written on it, but none of what he wanted appears in the bible at all, not even close. I would hate to be seen picking on religion, but how do you justify proving a point about discrimination and religion by using hate speech and lying about it?

I think there's a parallel to be drawn between the idea of religion being picked on, and some of the crackpots we get who take a specific bit of criticism ("Your idea fails at the start because your definition of 'dimension' is incorrect") and translate that to mean, "You're telling me I'm wrong because I don't agree with what you were taught". If a scientist keeps showing the crackpot where his idea is flawed because the crackpot keeps ignoring the response, is the crackpot being picked on?

! Moderator Note Sorry, our rules don't allow this sort of self-promotion, creating discussion threads to help you drive traffic. Please feel free to include a link in your signature to a non-commercial site, but don't open threads to promote it.

! Moderator Note This is not the first time you've been asked NOT to post speculative ideas as explanations in mainstream science sections. WE HAVE STUDENTS WHO RELY ON ACCURACY AND NEED YOU TO STOP IMMEDIATELY!!! If you can't understand the need for such a restriction, then just keep doing it and things will sort themselves out. If you'd like to stay a member, though, you should follow the rules you agreed to when you joined. Report this note if you must, but don't talk about it here.

Anecdotally, I know someone who had this same experience. After a long time of feeling guilty about not believing what he was raised to believe, he realized that when he was being ridiculed, it hurt more because he suspected his antagonists were right. He couldn't defend religion ultimately, but that wasn't his fault. He wanted to, and it hurt that he couldn't. Eventually, he saw that it wasn't mistreatment. He wanted facts and his opponents had them all. They became the bad guys, but all they really did was use their knowledge.

Like you, he probably did and couldn't find any links to specific atheist/theist discrimination, and unlike you, refrained from giving irrelevant examples. Most of those stories are about government, which is obligated to be separate from the church in the US, imposing the same restrictions on religious groups as they do everyone else. I fail to see even where these are examples of being picked on. I'm here at the heart of the "cake wars", and find it hard in this day and age to understand how anyone can think they can open a public business but exclude certain members of the public based on sexual orientation. I must have missed the part in the Bible where wedding cakes were sacrosanct.

Faith healing wasn't part of the original doctrine, afaik, but has been introduced in some sects. Regardless, I was trying to give an example of the kind of event science could measure that might provide actual supportive evidence.

I think the worth of a reading a thread is influenced greatly by your own participation in it. If I hadn't posted anything in this thread, but decided to read it to see if it had worth, I'd be too mad for pants right now.

I suppose it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The current chairman of the House Science Committee is a Tea Party Christian Scientist, and a climate change skeptic. In the US, science, politics, and ignorance go hand in hand in hand. How will the Republicans find representation when they have to make neurosurgeons AND Christian Scientists happy? Some perspectives really are mutually exclusive. At least they have misunderstanding and misrepresenting science as a common ground.

Because of the way the statement was written, I took it to mean, "This whole thread isn't worth reading, just the bits I wrote". I realize now I was probably wrong. John Cuthber said the whole thread was silly, but that's not the same thing as not-worth-reading. I'm not sure by what criteria MonDie can judge the value of a discussion before it happens, or participate in it but then claim in hindsight that it lacked worth. I am sure he will re-evaluate his sentiment and re-join us for an explanation, adding to the reading worth of the thread immensely.

This is wrong. Science does a lot to minimize anything wishful in the process.

No, that's not the question.

Your process is flawed, in that you have failed to provide the support you speak of when asked. We insist you use our process, as defined in our rules, most especially since it is our site, and also because the process has historically produced better results than yours.

Excellent point. And since you mention governments, I can't help draw a parallel between this image of fragile, sacred, underdog religion being picked on by rabidly rational unbelievers, and the far-right US politicians like Rick Santorum, who whinged on about how the media was picking on him by focusing on his most extreme views. Peel away the crazy, find the good, ignore the crazy, and all will be well, right? Religion isn't being picked on. Isn't that a bit like claiming those who build a house of cards are being picked on by heavy breathers?

Only if by "theory" you mean assumption, guessing, wild speculation, that sort of thing. If you mean scientific theory, then no, nothing like that has been observed or measured. Dimensions aren't what you think they are, they aren't places. "Planes of existence" are also not a scientific concept. Again, no evidence to support them, other than wishful thinking. The afterlife and reincarnation are also not supported scientifically. These are concepts that science considers supernatural, while science focuses on the natural, trying to explain reality based on what we can observe, measure, and test. I would focus on this part, if I were you. We actually know quite a bit about ourselves. The big problem is, most of the data available on the internet has been presented in a fairly popular manner, and the science is often less rigorous than it needs to be, so lots of people get an unclear education once they leave their formal schooling. And because you lack enough formal schooling, you can only cherry-pick the bits that make sense, right? But that leaves you with a bunch of important knowledge that you don't understand, and can't integrate into your ideas. I would advise you to go back and learn some science basics. LOTS of people weren't interested while they were in school, only to develop an interest later in life. You're smart, you just need more accurate data so your information is foundationally correct.

You don't know what you're missing. This Wednesday, we won't be meeting to discuss the non-worship of Zoroaster. Dues will not be collected at this time. You shouldn't come.

I don't think it's fair to poll until the engineered ignorance is filtered out. How many of those 35% that don't accept evolution have been told it would mean their god isn't real? The ultra-conservative candidates all seem to imply that they believe in God, not evolution, like it's mutually exclusive. It does no good to point to the Catholic's acceptance of the theory, because in many cases uber US right-wingers don't consider Catholics to be true Christians. Must be part of the campaign to be the exact opposite of the Democrats, and eschew intellectualism, rational thought, long-range planning, sustainability, and knowledge, and replace it with fear and knee-jerk reactions.

Be very careful with statements like this. The problem with research used like this is that you don't know what you don't know. You're going to make mistakes because the extent of your knowledge doesn't cover enough to understand relevance at the necessary levels. You'll be cherry-picking things you think you understand, and ignoring what you don't. You're going to make mistakes like this: Your definition of "dimension" seems off. Picture the first dimension as a line, length. Now move orthogonally (90 degrees, right angle) from every point on that line until you have a square. That's two dimensions, length and width. Now move 90 degrees away from every point in the square, until you have a cube. That adds the third dimension, height. To add a fourth spatial dimension, you would need to move at 90 degrees away from every point on the cube! Hard to imagine. Everything to do with perspective, nothing to do with time travel. And pavelcherapan's XYZT example is correct. Give someone your position in three dimensions, plus the time you'll be there, and you can plot any event in spacetime. Outside the known universe?! Are you redefining "universe" so it has an outside of it? How much "outside of the known universe" is there? Is it bigger than the known universe or smaller? Is there something outside the outside the known universe?