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Should you invest in silver with gold's price high? Experts weigh in
With gold's price high, some investors may want to turn to silver. But is that a good move? We asked some...
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I think they're great.
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Which is God and it’s made easy for them by preachers telling them simple sugar coated crap that has nothing to do with the truth.
And being so lazy and simple mindered they just suck that easy lieing crap up like a milk shake.
So of course there not going to read the book even though they should. Because it over turns all the crap that they want to believe like being special and going to heaven.
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I haven't read the book. I'll comment on the quote you provided.
"If perfect coherence is to be had, each new beliefs, must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions. 11 But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty: the number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each proposition is added to the list. How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising even if a computer was as large as the universe .... it would still be fighting to add a 300th belief to the list." 12
Harris' view that one could logically review beliefs and then discard bad ones, is at odds with his view of free will. Harris doesn't believe in free will and believes all actions and thoughts are ultimately caused by nature and we are not able to make any choices that are outside of what nature 'determines' for us. So, it seems odd to talk about determining logical contradictions, when it is Harris' belief that you will believe what nature says you will believe and you can't change the course of belief that nature has determined for you. With such a view, how can you know you made a truly logical choice, or if nature 'willed' you to make that choice. Logically, by Harris' logic, he can't know if he made the logical choice - because he never had any choice in the matter to begin with.
Claiming religion leads people to do immoral things, would also be illogical in Harris' world view, if he were consistent on the illogical things he believes. Simply put, you can't talk about moral responsibility of anything if you don't have free will to make your own choices, as Harris argued in his debate with William Lane Craig. Craig, spanked Harris in this debate, pointing out Harris' logical and moral inconsistency.
Do you have any more quotes from Harris' book?
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For example, to understand Friedrich Hayek's argument, you really want to read "The Road to Serfdom". His argument is very complex, rests on a number of suppositions that, in turn, require quite a bit of grounding - and the conclusions are very far-reaching and not obvious from the suppositions at all. When I read his book, my brain worked on overdrive, and I had to take regular breaks. It was a very intense and thought-provoking read, and I still, years after, come back to individual chapters every now and then to reexamine the arguments.
William McNeil's "The Rise of the West" is an even more challenging read. If you hope to read this book all at once, then, unless you are a professional historian with decades of experience of reading hardcore texts on history, you will likely fail and give up midway through. If you do manage to finish this book, your understanding of history will be phenomenal.
On the other hand, Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness" was a big disappointment. Reading it, I was not intellectually challenged at all, she did not say anything that I would not already know she would want to say, her logical reasoning was very sloppy, and the whole book ended up a reiteration of the same point in various ways - the point which was very loosely grounded in reality.
I suppose, there are also books which are not particularly sophisticated, but which allow you to look at various manifestations of the same phenomenon, so you can appreciate the universality of the phenomenon. I would include Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" into the list of such books: the point of the book can be summarized in a paragraph, but reading the book is still useful.
Sam Harris' argument against religion and in favor of rationalism is fairly basic, so I do not feel that his book would add much to it. It is worth noting that the bizarre idea that morals can only be rooted in god is largely an American phenomenon, and this idea has not been taken by many seriously historically, nor is it taken seriously in most other countries. So Sam's argument targets a very particular audience that is deeply confused on this issue, and someone who is not this confused likely will find Sam's points to be self-evident. It takes a pretty high level of delusion to seriously think that the idea that murder is wrong cannot be arrived at without belief in a creature from a fantasy book, and, perhaps, people with that level of delusion would not be able to get Sam's argument anyway.
My experience of debating with people in the US who root everything in god has been quite poor... Sometimes it feels that we are speaking different languages. They seem to not be able to understand basic English sentences when they go against their presuppositions, so Sam would do better offering them some mushrooms instead.
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That's you ricky condemned to hell. The fool who didn't obey his master and shut his mouth around smarter people. Proverbs 17:28
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25 “Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Festival remain until morning.
26 “Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God.
“Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”"  Considerate: 100%  
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