Phi for All

I've read the Bible probably four times all the way through. The first two times as a believer, the rest later in life after reading a lot of other texts from the same time. It's funny how there aren't many non-Christian texts that mention Jesus or the resurrection. There are lots of pre-Christian stories that talk about resurrections and virgin births and such, but very little else even from that area at the same time. It was actually the religion surrounding Christianity that made me so skeptical about it. My first church was Nazarene, and I could never understand why they didn't allow dancing or singing anything but hymns. I've been to several different flavors of Christian congregations since then, even Catholic, the number one, and they all had problems with each other. In the end, none of them acted the way their Christ was supposed to have, and so I looked around and found that I really didn't need an organized religion. Since then, as I said, I've read the Bible a couple of times as a non-believer, so I guess I have a more well-rounded perspective than you do, DrDNA. I'm not saying there are no deities, but I prefer the explanations science gives for the natural world over blind faith in old stories. The Bible can't be taken literally, so it must be subject to interpretation, so whose interpretation do you follow?

It takes you a year to read the Bible?! It's never taken me more than a couple of weeks, and that's with just a couple hours of reading time each day.

My point is there is a difference between blind belief in a deity that can't be observed, and objectively deciding that your doctor and the drugs he is giving you are going to be helpful. The former I would define as an act of FAITH, the latter an act of TRUST. I'm making a distinction that the two are N-O-T the same.

But who or what it is "faith" in does matter. In the case of God, there is nothing empirical to go by. In the case of a doctor administering drugs made by a pharmaceutical company, their validity and efficacy can be checked by the patient. That takes it from the realm of faith to the realm of trust. You don't have to blindly "believe" in your doctor or his medication, you can check it out so you can trust it. I make the distinction here, despite dictionary references, to point out the difference between religion and science, and our dependencies on both. Science can be verified and therefore trusted, while belief in a deity cannot and therefore must be believed in through the mechanism of faith. And the fuller definition you cited includes, "Depending on the religion, faith is belief in a single god or multiple gods or in the doctrines or teachings of the religion. Informal usage of faith can be quite broad, including trust or belief without proof, and "faith" is often used as a substitute for "hope", "trust" or "belief".

Someone else suggested it, but in the case of a doctor whose credentials and experience can be verified and measured, blind faith is not required for the placebo effect; the mechanism involved here is trust.

Wouldn't it be just as effective to keep Earth resources for Earth and use asteroids for anything we need to build off-planet, at least in terms of net energy gain (if this can be applied to mining mineral resources)? This assumes that by the time we have the ability to mine asteroids, we'd probably have facilities in space for refining and manufacturing. I always thought it would be extremely efficient to build and launch satellites for Earth from a facility on the moon.

Sorry to be off-topic here, but if my calculations correct, with the current exchange rate of about 1.5 dollars to 1 euro, isn't that $10.22 per gallon?! We're at $4/gallon here in Denver. If we went to 2/3 of what you're paying, I can guarantee the screams for hybrids and full-electric cars would keep you up at night over there. And you're right, at that point it wouldn't matter if fossil fuel emissions were affecting the climate.

In this instance, I thought we were talking about privatized roads, not roads built under government contract by private companies. If we sell the tollways to private companies, they're going to charge what the state did PLUS a margin for profit. It's what they've done with all the utilities and other formerly government run projects. Regardless of how you choose to look at the "who has the power" situation, I still maintain that we have more control over our own government than we do over corporations. We don't get to vote for a new CEO at GE. Political advocacy should be much more a part of every citizen's life, that's a big part of what I'm arguing about. At least we can know that promoting the general welfare through our own government can be more effective in the long run than believing corporations who just want to dodge taxes and regulations and send jobs away while promising to create jobs if we lower their taxes and soften the regulations. Absolutely. But the longer we wait, the more the biggest corporations are stacking the deck against us. Wait too long and we may find ourselves on the wrong side of the letter of the law, with nothing but the spirit of the law to hold on to. This is being done now with subsidies and no-bid contracts, all at the taxpayers expense. It's being done by lobbyists who make sure new laws have a public face that we'll approve, but have hidden agendas that favor a few companies over the rest of the market. My PSAs would at least be aimed at helping the public remember a bit of economics they may have learned a few decades ago, kind of like they learned not to litter when they were kids but may not think much about it now. Edit to add: Do you feel the current PSA campaign by the EPA to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has been "picking and choosing" some companies over others unfairly? Do you wish we'd never funded the campaign? Given how poorly you think of the federal government, was this something big business would have done on it's own as effectively and in as timely a manner?

I just learned a lot about you.

We never left the discussion.

Learn your environment, experience everything you can about it, treat everything as a learning experience, get to know the people who share your environment, absorb it all and let it shape you as a human. Build every day based on what you know and never stop learning. The point is, it's your life to figure out what the point is about it.

But it was you who said that "broken" is shorthand for "mentally defective".

I guess I missed the building churches part. I also don't think of it as celebrating atheism so much as making time for contemplating moral issues in a community of fellow humans. Atheism isn't a system obviously, but ethics and morality are becoming victims of our poorly funded public education and I think having a formal way to share these things with our families and neighbors would be beneficial.

Cool! So what's the objection to using the methodology of reinforcing ethical qualities via repetition, congregation and calendaring?

Where is the "funny"? The title promised me some funny!

I didn't get that at all. It's not the "religious ideologies rooted in fairy tale beliefs" he's promoting, it's the delivery vehicle he thinks should be emulated. Atheists don't get together regularly to talk about humanism, morality and ethics, so maybe we should set aside the time to do so. Atheists don't have holidays to celebrate the things we like about the world, so we use religious ones but just don't do the religious parts, so maybe we need our own. And organizing the communities is also something atheists could benefit from, especially to counteract political influence in countries like the US. It doesn't have to be an "indoctrination" if there isn't any fixed "beliefs", does it? I don't see it as an attempt to "control the people" so much as a method for helping keep our ideals working at the forefront of our minds, and exposure to varied philosophies. Knowing there are others who share our lack of belief in deities and interacting with them could be a good thing, no?

Especially since several requests to define the word didn't obtain any satisfactory results. The best we've gotten is that it's shorthand for mentally defective, which is somewhat predestined to garner negativity. It also makes the title statement of the thread an ad hominem attack. Would you say that children are mentally defective?

! Moderator Note Speculative thread, moving to Speculations.

! Moderator Note This is thread hijacking. I see that you've started your own thread for your idea, but please don't do this again to someone else's thread. Please stay on topic to the thread you post to.

That's just a placeholder post. Not sure why the system places those. Go to the main page, upper right and you'll find the link to ajb's blog under Recent Blog Posts. Or you can go there directly right here.

I liked the talk a great deal. The education part I feel is especially applicable. My teenager and I just had a talk this weekend about repeating things I've already said to her. She has a great memory and when I repeat something, I get, "I know, Dad", with the tone implying, "... I'm not an idiot!" I told her (maybe reminded her) that we know lots of things, but being reminded of them on a regular basis is important if we want them to be part of our daily functions. I'm not sure how this would be received by an intellectual group of people who reject religion. I'm having a hard time convincing people in a political thread that PSA reminders about consumer processes that could help us save money would be beneficial. We all know these things, so why pay to remind ourselves? Well, if we want things to really stick with us, we repeat them often if we want to get really good at it (some call it practice, if it's a language or playing piano or chess or tennis). Perhaps ethical conduct would be more closely practiced if we heard what we already know about it repeated on a regular basis. Sometimes we think we're too smart to hear things repeated. We're not idiots, Dad!

I don't think we would evolve to adapt to the natural environment if we didn't actually interact with the natural environment over many generations. We would be subject to the selective pressures of the artificial environment rather than the natural one. It's hard to say though, since we have little experience with populations in artificial environments spanning the kind of time evolution requires.

! Moderator Note Preaching is against our rules here. If you're going to make statements as if they were true, please back them up with supportive evidence. You are free to talk about what you believe, but not free to assert it as fact without backing those assertions up. Please obey the rules you agreed to when you joined this forum. Response to this modnote is unnecessary.

I apologize if this has already been done, but I couldn't find where anyone defined the term "broken" to everyone's satisfaction. It seems to imply different things to different people. Are broken people really mental defectives?

Does it have an odor? This could tell us whether it's a sanitary issue or perhaps way too much coffee.