Autism, Religion and God

Post Reply New Topic

I never claimed otherwise. I merely implied that in the absence of reverence for a common deity, some other ethical/ideological keystone is needed to fill the gap. It could even be something as simple as a re-orientation of the concept of "neighbors" from the (arguably default) physical-proximity context to something like biological-proximity, i.e. love all humans (or all primates, or all mammals, etc.) as thyself.

Bluh. This is such a poor understanding of what is being said in that article. It's also a bad attempt to distract from the fact that 'providing evidence to support an assertion' is still a hell of a lot more reliable than a claim with zero evidence.

Then there's this appeal to solipsism in an attempt to equalize absurd claims with rational ones:

A: If you need proof that solipsism is BS, stand in front of a train and take faith that it's not real.

B: Even the most basic claim that a god of no certain description exists, is not even close to equal with the claim that your neighbor exists.
Claim 1: A person who is detectable, tangible, & measurable is real. => Requires very little evidence.
Claim 2: A god that is undetectable, intangible, & immeasurable is real. => Requires vast amounts of evidence.
Furthermore,
Claim 3: A person who is detectable, tangible, & measurable is not real. => Requires vast amounts of evidence.
Claim 4: A god that is undetectable, intangible, & immeasurable is not real. => Is not even worth testing.
If claim 4 was worth investigating, we'd have to spend time on thousands of deities and mythical creatures.

In short, the burden of proof is on the claim that a god exists, not the rejection of that claim.

C: The belief that my neighbor is real does nothing but benefit the both of us. However, the claim that god exists... causes damage. Incredible damage. The claim would be harmless on its own. It's not on its own though, so it is harmful. The claim has been enforced, and used to generate more torture devices than nationalism. Not to mention much crueler devices (e.g. Judas cradle, breast shredders, thumb screws, breaking wheel, etc...) Heck, it's even a source of nationalism (e.g. curse of Ham as an excuse to invade Canaan). It encourages laws that promote disparity. It teaches people to misinterpret scientific concepts so that they fit beliefs rather than reality.
There is not valid evidence of a god, therefore I reject the claim, therefore people that I have no intention of harming want to harm me, therefore I feel obligated to address that it is absolutely worth fighting the claim. For the benefit of life on Earth.

It's early here. What he said...

I recall my mother just telling me about the basics of religion ya know the whole 10 commandments stuff and the famous lines but in general my folks never shoved their beliefs on me & were cool with me deciding what religion I should chose (if any).

I am agnostic and ever since I've moved to the bible belt it's been god this and christ that and how I'm damned by default & how I need to go to church and hear the word of the lord and how they try to mask their bigotry with the bible. The more and more I hear these people talk the more and more I'm becoming an all-out Atheist.

So to answer the question maybe to "lay the foundation" the basics if you will would be OK but let the kid decide for his/her self which direction (s)he want's to go in.

I agree with you. You can teach your children whatever you believe in, as long as you accept them for who they are. Also, teach them to have respect for other religions. Like, if you teach them to follow a religion, don't go saying that people of other religions or atheists are all horrible, Satanic sinners. And if you don't teach them a religion, don't say that religion is nonsense or that religious people are deluded or bad people.

Why attach the baggage? You can teach a child to be good. It's pointless to add supernatural men in the sky who judges you if you fail to be good. Furthermore, people who hold up holy books and say "here is an example of how to be moral and decent" very clearly have not read their own books.

Take for instance the 10 commandments, which many christians hold up as the backbone of their philosophy: the first three only serve to esteablish that Yahweh is jealous, petty and vengeful, oddly human traits for a deity.After that we get honoriong our parents, and having one day off because God did back when. Not too bad, but as for the top ten moral rules, these would not make my list. Next, they establish that stealing, adultery and murder are bad (keep in mind that in this ancient jewish law, murder only applied to fellow jews. Killing non-jews was a non-crime).
Adultery is bad, alright, but hardly criminally so, and pretty much no society in history has viewed stealing and murder as conducive to a functioning society, so claiming these as being uniquely good for coming from God is out. Fuinally, we have a law against coveting, which launches this lawbook straight into 1984 territory. A law against wanting is nothing short of immoral and totalitarian, and grounds for dismissing any moral guide that contains it.

But wait! Speaking of containing, remember the story back when Moses smashed the tablets? Yeah, He had to make a second set, which are the ones that made it into the alleged Ark. I don't remember the actual commandments off-hand, but they contain commandments for human sacrifice and the absolutely vital commandments against yeast and boiling a baby goat in its mothers milk. Because that would be sick.

So no, don't teach your child to be religious. Teach your child to question, and to evaluate answers. Teach your child to reason, and you will have a reasonable child. Teach your child to do onto others ( a sentiment far older than the bible, and with no need for divine decree).

Sorry for the rant, but as the son of a Child Care Provider, I've seen both one and two religiously raised children, and they are not better off.

I think you should teach a child how to think, not what you think. A child below a certain age will take what you say as the Truth with a capital T, and therefore saying any variation of "I just told them what I thought, and let them make up their own minds" is playing with a stacked deck. Besides, caveats like "but teach them to respect other religions" and "don't teach them that X group of people are bad thing Y" seem to resonate very poorly witht he actual holy texts, so again, why bother with the baggage?

I have a Bachelor of Science degree in theoretical mathematics. In addition to writing over two hundred pages of proofs in my regular courses, I spent half a semester of independent study toward my philosophy minor on proof theory. I know a thing or two about proof.

And you still don't get it. Stepping in front of a train and failing to will it away via faith might provide evidence against solipsism (except it totally wouldn't because solipsism doesn't posit that the experiencer has control over what they experience, only that they are alone in experiencing it). But evidence does not equate to proof. Not even strong evidence. Proof is not the limit at infinity of evidence.

Proof exists in relation to a model, such as a scientific model of reality. Scientific evidence establishes the strength of correlation between a model and reality. Proof does not map directly to reality. Invocation of the term "proof" necessarily implies a domain of a priori knowledge. All usage to the contrary is technically incorrect. That was my point as well as the point of the article to which I linked.

I don't know if you skipped by my earlier comment but I stated my opposition to raising children in a religious tradition. I do think kids should be taught about religion - you don't need to preach Islam to teach a child the difference between Wahhabism and Sufism.

I suppose it's possible to accuse me of preaching Monadology. Though I'm not aware of any atrocities carried out in Leibniz's name.

Solipsism is unfalsifiable, therefore pseudo-science at best.

And that is where you're misusing the article. Scientists want people to stop using the colloquial definition of proof when speaking about scientific evidence. Instead, you’re acting like scientists are getting pissed that people would dare presume that evidence is related to the probability that a claim is true. Science is based in materialism, realism, and empiricism. It revels in being proven false. That is how it works closer to the truth. Questioning one's own beliefs is a requirement of science. If you truly believe in an unfalsifiable hypothesis then that's fine, plenty of good people do. But it is anti-science. All usage to the contrary is technically incorrect.

I had read your first post, but it can't undo the offense done by claiming that it requires as much faith to believe your neighbor is real as it does to believe some of the claims about God. By doing so, you've stripped the values and properties from the concept of a living person and effectively reduced both to binary objects where 0 is non-existence and 1 is existence. Whether intentional or not, you’ve chosen a dehumanizing argument for the sake of shutting down pcuser over issues with the semantics of the word neighbor. Even if solipsism is true, it would still be more wrong to believe in the existence of that which has no evidence vs that which does:

I agree that learning about religion is a good thing. It promotes an understanding of other cultures, our world neighbors. My rant in part C was more of an argument for why it's better to let pcuser, myself, and others believe that god is nonsense than to raise a dehumanizing, unfalsifiable argument with no room for you to accept criticism of your methods.

The only thing you need to teach young minds is for them to always question everything. They should learn to question everything, field-test the claims of others for themselves, and how to be a self-taught individual.

Well said. It didn't bother me but you rebutted it well...

To dismiss solipsism on scientific grounds is to commit the formal logical fallacy of denying the antecedent, as solipsism presupposes the inapplicability of the scientific method.

If you dismiss solipsism as being pseudoscientific at best, or rather, if you hold that this is a valid reason to dismiss any notion, you are necessarily restricting the set of metaphysical positions which you might consistently hold to an incomplete subset of all possible metaphysical positions. This subset of metaphysical positions available to scientifically-minded people is not itself a proven thing. It isn't generated via a process of deductive logic. Hence there is no manner in which sense can be differentiated from nonsense by virtue of choice of metaphysics; the concept of God can only become coded as nonsense after this choice is made, while the choice itself is arbitrary. If you decide to choose anything at all, you've committed an act of faith i.e. accepted an unfalsifiable argument.

And such a choice is entirely unnecessary. The world doesn't stop working when you replace your metaphysical foundations with conditional assumptions, it starts working better because fundamental disagreement between people who do so is impossible (they can still disagree, just not in such a way that the disagreement cannot be resolved). Science doesn't stop working when you stop viewing it as a method of generating truth-apt statements about an objective physical reality and start viewing it as a method of generating useful models of physical reality as we perceive it. Again, it gets better, as that abstraction expressed via modeling reality vs. describing reality is the very reason why scientific understanding is able to advance over time, relatively unhampered by ideological attachment to previously-developed understandings, as compared to the old established religions.

If you were under the impression that I was advocating solipsism or defending it as a position, you need to work on your critical reasoning skills. Start by looking up argumentum ad absurdum, and try to work out from there how, in light of that whole denying the antecedent thing, if an atheist's statement that God is nonsense is valid, necessarily implying that sense and nonsense are distinguishable via metaphysical position, then a solipsist's statement that his neighbor is nonsense is also valid.

Asimov's statement references a great deal of unstated, unqualified assumptions rooted in unfalsifiable arguments. One of these is the persistence of unobserved phenomena. Another is the notion that "the earth" exists at all. I don't suggest that there's much use in the act of questioning these assumptions (which as I understand it is what Asimov identifies as "wronger than both of them put together"). Rather my position is that it's unnecessary to accept unqualified assumptions at all, that one can simply recognize that all such assumptions are conditional, and carry on at least as ideologically-unhindered as before.

Naturally there is a cost. The necessary implication of this choice is that these statements about "nonsense" and "wrongness" are in fact nothing more than statements about the disutility of the concepts referred to. Disutility is of course defined with respect to a given domain, and in the context of these remarks the implied domain is something like 'understanding and interacting with the material world'. And with respect to that domain, I would agree that the evaluations of disutility expressed in those statements are correct.

However, I suspect it might be the case that such dry 'expressions of disutility' might themselves be of disutility in comparison to 'nonsense and wrongness rhetoric' with respect to the domain of atheistic-scientific ego.

Thread-Title: Autism, Religion and God

How should I "dissect" this...

Autism:

The way I see it this entire "autism" business is FAR too "open-ended" regarding its very definition. See, ANY number of "factors" can contribute to the "impairment" of inter-actions with others, for example, I was almost always perma-grounded, all the time, due to my original "step-father" being largely an abusive-type (alcoholic-type behaviour due to being a "former alcoholic"), and always went out of his way to find reasons to BE an ass-hole.

Also, what "impairs" people CAN be due to MORE than merely a "medical-condition" such as a psychological-chain, hypnotic-restrictions, self-imposed inhibitions, etc., for any number of "reasons" that the "mind" may use as a "justification" for such self-punishment. I am a "skeptic" regarding the "autism" status being what is claimed & caused by the "establishment/corporate-government" sources of information. Sure, some researchers have linked vaccines, fluoride, fluoxetine, and even the television, somehow being linked to autism, but ultimately, I find something very suspicious about this "epidemic" considering that it's only existed since "modern" culture (just like how cancer was NEVER an "epidemic" until AFTER WWII and THAT is something that I do NOT regard as being a mere accident or coincidence).

Religion: I believe that EVERY religion on earth (and even in the "spirit-worlds" for that matter) need to COLLAPSE... especially the one that can be described as Corporate-Government. The only "religion" that should even exist at all is that of Absolute-Pacifism (for reasons that I'm not going to get into in this post but if you have a good six or so months to spare I have the references as to the reasons hyper-linked before these parentheses).

God: Unfortunately, this term has far too many "versions" and "competiting definitions" for what constitutes a god, and in some "para-normal research" documents (from the "Cross-Correspondences" in particular), the researchers had come to a discovery or determination that we all eventually "evolve" into that of which the men in the past once called gods, but the only reason it "appears" to be "god-like" is simply because you do not have any "intellectual/scientific-understanding" of the phenomenon & how to control such technologies.

Consider, that if I took an Electro-Magno-Gravity Saucer (i.e.: Space-Craft) out into the universe, and decided to visit a "sentient" but "primitive" culture, I might be called a "god" within their history books & that I "descended from heaven" (when "heaven" is their term for "sky") then "rose up again into heaven" back into my space-craft (what they may record as being a "chariot" due to not having a developed enough vocabulary yet for space-ship), etc. I might even be able to pull off a feat of making it look like I died, but was simply using that "zombie-vial" that was used in the story of Romeo & Juliet, for what-ever reason, perhaps I had other people in-pursuit of me from other parts of the universe who somehow decided that I was some sort of space-pirate, but to shake them off my tracks, I had to fool them into thinking that I was no longer alive for either capture or assassination.

Summary/Conclusion: ALL of those terms are subjective-vocabulary & it's pointless to bother trying to argue for their causes or whether it exists or not due to such a waste of time as to being completely useless & unproductive.

In your opinion God is nonsense. The vast majority - over 90 percent - of people on planet Earth would disagree with your view. I guess they must just be all 'deluded'.

I don't believe in indoctrinating children into a particular set of religious beliefs. I think the faith a person wants to pursue, if any, should be completely their choice. If I have kids, and one of them wants to be Pagan, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or whatever, I'll let them. The only exceptions to that rule would be violent extremist sects, or outright scams like Scientology.

Yes, you can do this, but when the child inevitably asks, "Why should I be good?", or alternatively "What does being good mean anyway?", what will you say?

Yes, to all of the above! Spot on!