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When one major party no longer believes in elections, Democracy is dead, right?
@jack
Hi Jack
The prediction game generally isn't very lucrative. But If I had to say one way or the other I'd say it depends on the agendas set forth with the winning party.
If Trump wins knowing he's got four years to make his mark and installs extremists in key positions as opposed to inexperienced governmental people like last time, it could end democracy as we know it in America.
On the other hand if Biden wins and continues to leave his centralist left reputation to seek even further extremes to the left as he's been doing trying to secure his legacy, democracy may be in trouble under him as well. Harris would be more disastrous than either Biden or Trump.
At the end of the day though barring any unforeseen natural disasters or wars, America will survive and repair what damages has been done as opportunity arises. Who knows? Even a broken clock is right twice a day and maybe democracy will thrive.
But if extremist like ricky who have the "any means possible" attitude that the leftist group Antifa demonstrated; occupy key positions and hears voices in their heads thinking it's their god talking to them, who knows what will happen?
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Climate change; fact, scam, or both?
@ChristianSollers
Very objective view, I commend you. That's the crux of the problem. Extremes on both sides of this topic are only interested in screaming the loudest. Yes scum on the left exploited the thing before we had a good understanding. Of course the right responds with their extremism thinking we can dump pollutants in the air at will with no consequences. One look at a smoggy city tells us that ain't true. And with one in four copd patients being non smokers we can't deny the effects we ARE having.
Long-term exposure to particulate matter PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxides increases your risk of developing COPD. Sources of PM 2.5 are motor vehicles, factories, powerplants, wood burning and wildfires. Exposure to poor air quality worsens symptoms and accelerates lung function decline in adults, especially if you have other risk factors for COPD. https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/copd/what-causes-copd
Most want to phrase the argument as such: Climate change is too big for humans to stop, it's a cycle, or that we've accelerated the cycle and we can slow it down. Those are political positions. But as noted above from the American Lung Association we are having an effect on our environment that makes it very feasible that the cycle of climate change we're experiencing could be effecting us in negatives ways it might not be if we weren't polluting our planet. The science leads us to conclude we need to stop polluting. The problem is too many political and/or economic interests blur the lines.
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Why the repetitive STRIFE between Islam/the Muslim World and Israel?
Islam is representative of Satan in Time and the spiritual war between Satan and Elohim that was initiated before Time was created. Islam is a product of adultery between Abraham and Hagar while the child of promise is Isaac through Sarah, not Ishmael through Hagar; therefore, the struggle between Israel (Jacob, the son of Isaac) and Ishmael's descendants find its genesis in unfaithfulness and strife i.e., sin. The entirety of Scripture details this war between Satan and Elohim and expounds upon why the Messiah appeared in Time; specifically, to destroy the works of Satan through the Gospel (1 John 3:8b), a Gospel ordained "before Time began" (2 Timothy 1:8-10).Israel is the eschatological Land of promise through which Elohim will sum-up all things through Messiah, the Millennial Kingdom, the judgement of Satan (Revelation 20:10) and the judgment of unrepentant humanity (Revelation 20:11-15), the creation of a New Earth and New Heaven and the establishment of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22); therefore, Israel will remain and will soon come under a nuclear attack initiated by the demonic coalition of Russia-China-Islam/Iran v. Jerusalem, Israel...this will initiate the 2nd-Advent of Messiah Jesus; therefore, Israel will remain irrespective of Allah's (Satan's) intent.
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Should Marinara Be Legal?
Marinara is indeed very different than marijuana. Some differences:JulesKorngold said:
It's MY debate. The topic is MARINARA. Comply or rot in hell.RickeyHoltsclaw said:@JulesKorngold ; No it's not...Marijuana is the topic...stop the stup-idity.
1) 1 in 6 of those under 18 who use marijuana are addicted to it. Marinara, while tasty has not been found addictive.
2) Marijuana can damage the functioning of the brain and permanently lower IQs. Marinara has not been found to permanently damage one's brain, maybe appetite.
3) Marijuana affects reaction time, perception, and bodily movement which could result in driving accidents. While marinara has caused occasional heart burn, it has not impaired people's ability to move or drive.
4) People who use marijuana are more likely to have relationship problems, worse educational outcomes, lower career achievement, and reduced life satisfaction. Marinara has not been shown to make a person's life worse - maybe they get fat from the pasta they eat with the marinara, but not from the marinara itself.
So there are lots of differences between the two. So enjoy your marinara.
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Should Marinara Be Legal?
Marinara is indeed very different than marijuana. Some differences:JulesKorngold said:
It's MY debate. The topic is MARINARA. Comply or rot in hell.RickeyHoltsclaw said:@JulesKorngold ; No it's not...Marijuana is the topic...stop the stup-idity.
1) 1 in 6 of those under 18 who use marijuana are addicted to it. Marinara, while tasty has not been found addictive.
2) Marijuana can damage the functioning of the brain and permanently lower IQs. Marinara has not been found to permanently damage one's brain, maybe appetite.
3) Marijuana affects reaction time, perception, and bodily movement which could result in driving accidents. While marinara has caused occasional heart burn, it has not impaired people's ability to move or drive.
4) People who use marijuana are more likely to have relationship problems, worse educational outcomes, lower career achievement, and reduced life satisfaction. Marinara has not been shown to make a person's life worse - maybe they get fat from the pasta they eat with the marinara, but not from the marinara itself.
So there are lots of differences between the two. So enjoy your marinara. -
Do Christians have a warrant to say they are the "true" religion?
An argument I've seen in this thread is that any claim of exclusivity means the religion is false. This is a fallacy. Something can be exclusive and true. 2+2=4 is an exclusive claim, however it is true. One could argue that it would be far more inclusive if we allowed 2+3=4 to be considered true also. However, the validity of a claim, rests on the claim itself. The important question is not if something is exclusive, then, but if the claim is true.
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Do Christians have a warrant to say they are the "true" religion?
MistakenIdentity said:Newsflash - literally the entire planet in all of human history has believed in one religion or another. What you mean by “real world”!?
I mean, you must understand that even mathematics isn’t real either, right? It’s all imaginary.I am asking you to give an example of a statement about the real world that is neither true nor false. "Real world" is the objective reality independent of one's perspective. Religious constructs are not part of the real world, although human brains coming up with them are.
That is precisely my point: the fact that something has not been proven one way or the other rigorously does not imply that it being true and false are comparably reasonable conclusions. You may not have an accurate proof that 1 + 1 = 2, but you would be a fool based on that to say that 1 + 1 = 2 and 1 + 1 =/= 2 are "just opinions". Try living your life as if 1 + 1 =/= 2 and see what happens.MistakenIdentity said:No one can prove the existence of the massless invisible unicorns either, yet anyone who seriously believes in them would be assumed by any reasonable person to be deluded. The idea that inability to prove something one way or the other makes any opinion of it valid seems ludicrous to me.
You do realized that we practiced mathematics for thousands of years without being able to “prove” it either, right? It wasn’t until Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in the early 1900’s that it was done. So what does that say about your 1+1=2?
And, to your own point, do you even understand their proof? Can you prove 1+1=2?
Examining why they are wrong is what this whole conversation is about...MistakenIdentity said:And? Can you prove it?
Tell what to them? That America is real? I think they know that without me.MistakenIdentity said:It is reasonable though? Tell that to the original Native Americans who lost their entire country. And if your measure of something real is based on “convenience” then that’s an extremely low bar indeed! Here, I’ll help you out - you’re confusing the physical reality with concepts and beliefs and getting it all mixed up. You’re inconsistent in how you treat religion versus other ideas and you’re even confusing belief in religion with the belief in a country, when they’re identical things.In what way am I confusing them? Please elaborate.
It is not a viable long-term method to provide cohesion. It has been good at enslaving people and causing them to kill each other in the millions though.MistakenIdentity said:You’re kidding, right? Religion is one of the most viable long-term methods to provide cohesion in all of human history!
Work better at what? They are cool brain hacks to apply in particular situations, but if you believe them to literally be true and apply them everywhere, then you will get smoked. If I thought that any pain was a trial bestowed upon me by the Universe so I could get stronger, I would seek to engage in behaviors causing me the largest amount of pain, and my life expectancy would not be very high.MistakenIdentity said:I do brain hacks all the time and they do work but wouldn’t they work better if you believed it to be true? Most certainly! And that is all that theists are doing. Do they have doubts? Sure they do, even priests but they muddle along and make the world better in their own way.
Your beef is against a very small but powerful portion of theists.
I am aware of that, and being aware of that shields me from making really bad decisions based on limited sensory information. Such bad decisions as letting a book from nearly 2,500 years ago tell me how to live my life.MistakenIdentity said:You should know that what you perceive to be reality is also going through flawed and incomplete input mechanisms of your eyes and ears. Even your memory is faulty and your mind is mostly unconscious. Your version is reality is very unlikely to be true either. -
Do Christians have a warrant to say they are the "true" religion?
In other words, things that are not part of the real world.MistakenIdentity said:
Yes, nearly everything that is based on personal opinion, tradition or cultural convention or context.
No one can prove the existence of the massless invisible unicorns either, yet anyone who seriously believes in them would be assumed by any reasonable person to be deluded. The idea that inability to prove something one way or the other makes any opinion of it valid seems ludicrous to me.MistakenIdentity said:
Whether there is a god is a good example, since we're discussing religion. No one can prove the existence of god, or gods, or any supernatural claim, for that matter so we're all in the same boat, making decisions and concluding what is true based on our experiences and knowledge.
Obviously subjective determinations aren't objective but they can be based on objective facts. And most people use a combination of objective facts and guesses and wishes and hopes to determine how they want to live their lives. Neither of us should have a problem with that.
We should only intervene if there is harm being done or if people stray beyond the boundaries of their religion into our secular world. Which theists benefit from directly!
I do not have a problem with anything. I just say that some people are wrong.
All religions I am familiar with involve fantasy concepts that have no reflection in reality. People believing and behaving as if something was true even when it is not is a common phenomenon, but that does not mean that it is a healthy phenomenon.MistakenIdentity said:
You should expand your horizons beyond the Abrahamic religion and try and understand how other religions work! Some of them don't have deities at all, so basing religion on non-real things is not weird. Nor is being patriotic to the country of your birth - countries don't really exist either. So people believing and behaving as if their god exists is not that weird if you think about it.
Someone who says that America is not real is objectively wrong. The interpretation of the concept of a "country" as something existing only in human minds and on papers is reasonable, and if people believing in "god" admitted that it is just a convenient concept and is not something that literally exists in the world independently from human thinking, then their belief would make a lot more sense. But then it would not really be a religion any more.MistakenIdentity said:
Again - get away from the simple math examples and deal with the actual real world of humans and their motivations. Are you going to argue with an American that America isn't real? That it's a figment of their imagination or that countries don't really exist? Or would you argue that Americianism has done cultural harm on the planet?
Yes... when it is convenient. I have never heard any Christian say that if their god ordered them to murder someone, they would. Muslims are more honest about it: some of them not only say so, but actually do it. Christians used to do that too, but over time the majority of them swapped dogma for practicality.MistakenIdentity said:
Everyone takes their religion seriously! Even those on the fence at least try and adhere to what they believe is the right thing to do. And how is it intellectually dishonest to say that they're not sure whether god really exists or not but they want to go along with it? What's wrong with that?
Oh, I do not disagree that it is, at least partially, a coping mechanism. I do not think it is a good one though: nothing grounded in falsehood is a viable long-term strategy.MistakenIdentity said:
I would suggest to you that believing in falsehoods probably helps them mentally to deal with the mundane horror show of actual real world life. More importantly for you to realize though is that your own life is full of falsehoods and forgeries and unprovable things.
Again, the problem isn't what people believe in but what they impose onto others to believe in. Life's too short to tell people what they "should" and "should not" believe in. I seriously doubt you have a very good alternative to offer anyway.
All you're doing is to tell people to believe what you believe, which is where I come in to tell you not to.
I certainly hold many models in my head that are... loose interpretations of reality. For example, I do competitive ultramarathon running, and I like to think during the events that my pain is a trial bestowed on me by the Universe so I may get stronger. It is not true (to the best of my knowledge), but it helps me keep going when all else fails.
However, I very deliberately employ this interpretation, fully understanding that it is just a poetic metaphor. I will not seriously claim that the Universe bestows any trials for me. The ultimate reality is that I chose to do something that my body is not well adapted to do - and paid the price.
Again, if people believing in these things admitted to others and themselves alike that they are useful fiction, I would be cool with that. I love fantasy and cool roleplay and engage in it a lot myself.
The problem arises when one stops differentiating between fantasy and reality. -
Do Christians have a warrant to say they are the "true" religion?
Could you please provide an example of anything in the real world that is neither true nor false?MistakenIdentity said:
This is only true depending on the kind of logic you're adopting. For example, fuzzy logic, which is based on probabilities has been far more useful in the actual real world of engineering than the traditional "true or false" view that you're talking about. And when you reduce the world to simplistic binary statements you miss the fact that none of the actual real world behaves that way.
You're quoting essentially mathematical models, which are nice and maybe even useful but the actual reality of science is based upon models that are bounded and conditional and precise and narrow. The real world, and actual real-world science, is chaotic, statistical, non-binary and complex.
The hunches, assumptions and guesses - of what? Of whether something is true or false. As I said, one's inability to determine with 100% certainty that something is true or false does not change it being true or false. People can make mistakes about the entity in question, but the entity in question itself is not a mistake.MistakenIdentity said:
Suggesting that something is true or false is very useful in many contexts but 99% of the world works on hunches, assumptions, guesses, hope, prayer and pure luck. You're missing the actual point that "factual statements" are inputs into a decision making process - and there are actual facts about democracy that demonstrate it is the best governmental system, compared to others; and if you rank and weight all the evidence, you should conclude that democracy is the best.
Bringing this back to religion - so who really cares if god actually flooded the entire planet or not: the lesson to be drawn is that god is vindictive, petty, generally wrong all the time. While you argue on the "fact" of the matter, which is a waste of time anyway since most theists accept that some of the Bible is mythical or metaphorical, meanwhile we have people actually believe it to be true, but not realizing the consequences of what they believe.
It is impossible to claim that something is "best" objectively, since qualitative assessments are inherently subjective.
Is it? When I play a music piece, I play it on a real instrument, and I have a method for picking chords and rhythm based on what I want to express. The stories we tell may be fictional, but we have full understanding that they are fictional. Nobody (as far as I know) claims that Sauron is a real being. Compare it to claims people make about the Christian god, or Allah.MistakenIdentity said:
Sure, religion, politics, economics, sports, gaming, literature, music, art and nearly everything we do is pretty much detached from reality! These are the actual things that drive humans to gather, congregate, agree or disagree, to cooperate or kill each other, you know - the actual reality of fuzzy, primal, humans.
I mean, nearly all of us are trying to escape the realities of work, our eventual deaths, boredom by pursuing activities that are entire unrooted from reality. In fact, the discussions we're having ultimately unrooted from reality anyway!
My point is that, when push comes to shove, people tend to stick to reality, no matter what fantasy claims they make in a different situation. Very few Christians behave in specific situations the way their beliefs would suggest. When they do, the result is a disaster, such as millions corpses laying in the Moslem land.MistakenIdentity said:
A lot of the time, people use religion to confirm their existing beliefs and there's a great deal of cherry picking, and sweeping inconveniences under the rug. And most religious texts are ambiguous or incomplete anyway with holes you can drive through - so who really cares about how they come to moral conclusions. The only thing to point out is that they do not have a warrant to claim anything is true. As I say in my OP - Christians cannot claim truth, only their opinion that something is true.
And you can't really argue against someone's opinion, right? Everyone is allowed to have one. The only rule is that they cannot force their beliefs onto others or insist that others follow their personal interpretations. This is how you argue against theists - not whether something is "fact" or not.
I absolutely can argue against someone's opinion. I cannot argue against them having that opinion, but I can say that their opinion is wrong. If someone believes that 2+2=5, he is objectively wrong. Now, I will not put a gun to his head and say, "Change your opinion!" But I will say that his opinion is wrong.
But the fundamentalists are the ones taking their religion seriously. "Who cares", you say? Think about what you are asking: "Who cares if people are intellectually honest or not?" I care.MistakenIdentity said:
Fundamentalists are few and far between; but again, who cares what they claim - so long as they do not impugn upon others' rights to believe, who really cares? And generally, they don't really care about the science anyway - they care that they are allowed to maintain their creationist beliefs. Even those creationists that like the discovery institute don't really get very far and are not considered credible. So leave those folks alone.
The only people to tackle are those, as you point out, try to use their religions to suppress others. And for those people, the debate shouldn't be about facts or their beliefs themselves, but the fact that they can't prove their own religion is true, or even their own god! For that intellectual crime alone, they should be dismissed.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that you see no problem with someone believing in a falsehood or in something that lacks evidence supporting it, as long as they do not bother others. I get this position. My point though is that believing in a falsehood affects their life negatively. And I see every instance of a human choosing truth over fantasy a small victory for him, and for others too due to him being a great role model for others. -
Do Christians have a warrant to say they are the "true" religion?
@Factfinder
And this kind of subjective thinking corrodes all mental processes, on a very deep level. I remember having a conversation with a student who was accusing J. K. Rowling of being transphobic. Her argument was essentially, "What she says is offensive, so it is transphobic". My attempts to discuss whether what J. K. Rowling said was actually true went nowhere, as the student insisted that her words being "offensive" made any further considerations irrelevant.
Just imagine what consequences on one's life thinking that their emotional response to an idea is more important than truthfulness of that idea has... It is no surprise that these people often do not exercise, have poor diets, are overweight, have terrible work ethics, are poor communicators, and so on and so on. Since they brush away all suggestions that they might be doing something wrong ("Who are you to tell me what I should do?!"), there is no negative feedback telling them that their life is going down the drain.
Conversely, I knew a girl who got sick of everyone telling her that "she is okay the way she is" (she was extremely obese) and decided that enough was enough. Over the course of a year she went from barely being able to fit in her car seat, to looking lean as an Asian model. All other areas of her life also improved respectively.
Putting the truth before the feelings and acting on it makes one into a different person, with drastically different life outcomes.
