Phi for All

Is this for homework? Can you show us what you've got so far?

This is why it seems to me that faith is quantifiable, and that the extreme end of the scale is the most desirable, what a religion would hope for as the default for its practitioners.

Do you aspire to have more faith? Is more faith better with regards to your religion?

I still can't think of any situation where your distinction holds true. Children obviously assume God is real if their parents talk about Him that way, but anyone past the age of reason who questions God's existence and later comes back to a firm belief has not simply flipped a switch; they have questioned their faith, torn it down and analyzed it, and then built it back up again to the point where it is now usually stronger than before. I can point to several examples of that in my own experience, but I don't know anyone who ever switched it on and off like you describe. If you insist that faith in God is binary, then 100% is, by default, the extreme positive choice.

You say that like we don't get pretty law students looking for advice about sex from us science geeks all the time. What I find curious is that it's been two days since she posted and none of our members from Oz have proposed to her yet.

Cap'n will have to do it, Mods have no control over whether the results are public or not. We can't be trusted with that kind of power, we'd go mad, MAD I tell you!

Roflcopter. Perhaps it was the daily drone of the pledge that dampens the significance, I don't know. It's not a very effective way of learning the importance of pledges, vows and your word of honor. I wonder if the divorce rate would go down if couples crossed their hearts and hoped to die before cheating on each other. But if we were trying to put the words "under God" into the pledge today, instead of trying to take them out, I think the unconstitutionality of it would be much clearer to everyone.

I'm really tired of your one-way street attitude, iNow. Why do you get to call Pangloss a "hypocrite", and then say that his position "disgusts you", then dismiss one of his statements as "nonsense" while calling *him* dismissive? And now when he simply turns your own words back on you, you claim that he's been persecuting you: Why don't you stop playing to the crowd with indignant outrage? I think it's really two-faced of you to claim that Pangloss poisoned the well after all the crap you've personally attacked him with in this thread. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to demonstrate what a hypocrite really is.

Any quantitative measurement could be boiled down to represent multiple binary elements, but that doesn't make every measurement a binary one. And you yourself said that a definition of God is necessary for every faith, so you are making qualitative judgments about your definition in order to have faith in your god. By making those judgments, you are boiling down the quantitative measurements in order to define your god, and thus you are growing your faith through learning and experience. You add or discard bits to eventually accumulate a definition that you can have faith in. Your god is not that separate from your religion, since different religions define their God in different ways. Even the Abrahamic God has three distinct major definitions, so your faith in the Islamic version isn't as strong as the Christian one (I assume), or the Judaic one. Therefore, faith in your god can't be binary, since it involves much learning, decision-making and experience in the same way elements of a religion do.

I like that a lot.

Has there ever been a hierarchical argument that the inclusion helps people who answer to an ultimately higher power to pledge allegiance to the flag of our nation? "As long as you understand that my loyalty to the nation is under my loyalty to God, I pledge allegiance." That's the tact I would take if I were arguing to keep it. Which I'm not. Vows like this should be powerful and taken very seriously, especially when they're often taken daily. I think it's a very big deal.

Find a study group. This will give you more opportunities for friendship, broaden your social life and improve your grades. End of story, right there. Having sex when you're uncomfortable and unready is hardly going to be the great experience your friend says it is. It's like going to a dance with a hamstring injury and the flu. You're not going to have a good time, wait for better circumstances. 1. The oxytocin released in your body during orgasm reacts with a medication you take, and it makes you extremely maternal for a bit, then turns to depression and really takes it's toll on you. You're working with your doctor to find alternative medication but it could take a while. 2. Given that anyone your age is probably going to be less experienced, you want to hold out for someone more mature who can make your first time a truly memorable experience. If your friend knows some older men, just keep raising the age until she runs out of choices. If she knows someone past 80, go ahead and date them, keep them out until they fall asleep, then tell them how great they were when they wake up. 3. Just be honest with your friend. You're uncomfortable with set-up sex, you are afraid to hurt her feelings and you promise to join a study group so you will meet someone you genuinely like well enough to get intimate with. Good luck, westgirl! Your body, your terms, you're great!

Oh great! Where were you when I ordered it from the library last night? Probably lounging abed in your stupid UK time zone....

Moderator Note: Thread moved from Relativity to Evolution, Morphology and Exobiology. Click this link for a similar thread to use as a starting point for your discussion. And consider the fact that our ability to treat ourselves medically was naturally selected for.

I'm sorry you think it's stupid. I find it very interesting that your approach to Hinduism is superseded by science. Many people reverse that order. If it's not too stupid, I'd like to ask you why you think all religions are right. Since they all have varying elements, what is it that could possibly make them *all* right? Is it a specific element they all share or are they all right from an individual's perspective, or is it because of something different?

I disagree completely. I think most religious people, if you asked them about their faith, would tell you that it has grown over the years, much like trust or convictions. Many people start out supposing something is true, and when it proves itself over time, their belief strengthens. Trust is a great example too. You don't start out trusting someone or something wholeheartedly, you need to build trust through experience. Similarly, faith is something that is learned, not switched on or off. As a person learns more about his or her religion, they build faith. It becomes stronger the more they learn, the more they experience what it means, the more they share it with others. This behavior over time has nothing binary about it. People may suddenly declare a belief in a deity, but if you ask them when they're older if their faith was always the way it is now, I doubt you get many people who would say it hadn't changed over time, strengthening or weakening depending on their experiences.

I know there have been a lot of ideas for controlling cars on a highway, but I think that's taking an inefficient system of transportation and making one part of it slightly more efficient. For more populous areas, I'd prefer to see a mix of short-trip personal vehicles (like the Smart Car or the Tango) and mass-transit rail for longer trips. We love the autonomy and convenience of our cars, but they and the road system are becoming increasingly more expensive and congested.

How strongly do you believe in the Abrahamic God? How much do you believe in some form of Life after Death? It really is in how you ask the question. Most people will prefer to answer quantitatively if you let them. Binary commitments are much more difficult, imo.

And we're not likely to educate ourselves as a society in the near future, either. On a federal level, we allow many things to happen that are at odds with our morality, just because it's easier. I fear we won't look into a more efficient, more productive, more humane way of dealing with violent offenders because the current system is like a salve that takes the pain away temporarily, but doesn't stop us from being wounded in the future. My future solution to the death penalty: "Oh, they've encased him in carbonite. He should be quite well protected. If he survived the freezing process, that is." ―C-3PO

Well, as you can see, I'm trying to determine if faith is always at the extremes, either 0% or 100%, or if there is a quantifiable strength about it that varies between believers. If the latter, is one of the goals of religion to increase that strength as much as possible during the lifetime of the believer? Is "conviction' or "faith" a strong belief, or is it an unshakable belief? If it's unshakable, and therefore binary, then how can it grow or diminish?

Absolutely, but that doesn't preclude it being accurate for faith, does it? But the smoker is more analogous to someone with faith who does works that reflect that faith. It still doesn't show that one either has faith or does not. Examples have been given of people who have, or profess to have, or seem to have, varying degrees of faith. If you google "How strong is your faith?", it will show you many religious sites that provide some kind of metric for judging the strength of faith. Apparently, one can show doubt but still have faith, so wouldn't a person with absolutely no doubt have a stronger faith than someone who occasionally doubts? Can you give any similar examples of a binary form of faith that shows a uniformity of intensity?

Let's not forget personal efficiency and safety. People riding in a train can do other things instead of driving, such as reading, working, relaxing. And it's much safer to have a train on a fixed rail instead of many vehicles driving independently. It's also safer to talk on the phone from a train.

How, and by whom? Citation please. I've never heard of any law like this. Are you talking about how modern complex lifeforms can't be generated from inorganic materials, or are you claiming that something like a protobiont couldn't have been spontaneously generated? Edit: Wow, a lot of people beat me to post #3! You must have claimed something radical, dstebbins.

But there are over 9000 sects of Christianity alone, and each believes something slightly different. Your definition #1 would require each practitioner of a particular religion to have an equal amount of faith in their sect and its tenets for it to be a binary condition. And for definition #2 to be binary, again, everyone has to believe in the same thing in the same way with the same intensity. The evidence doesn't support that. I can point to many testimonies of the faithful from many religions who claimed to have faith at one point in their lives, only to have it grow due to some religious experience, or diminish due to a secular one. Paul admonished the Corinthians for not growing their faith, telling them he needed to feed them milk since they weren't ready for solid food. Faith can't be binary if it grows through teachings and experience. And if faith has a quantifiable scale, then that scale has a low end and a high end, the extremes of any quantifiable condition. And if more faith is better than less faith, I'd like to know where too much faith can be considered extreme.

At the moment, I'm trying to determine if faith is a binary condition, or if it has degrees of strength. It makes no sense to me that everyone who claims to have faith in the existence of God (or in the various claims of their religion) has it to the same degree, nor does it seem like any religious texts hold them to such a claim.