1. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #122649 by dsaltarelli on February 5, 2008 at 6:22 pm

-Goldy

If religion is definable as accepting at least one proposition, then it's never as easy as chalking it up to genetics. While genetics may be a culprit in making a person predisposed towards one belief or another, my experience is teaching me that there's always a single, emotionally charged linchpin at the center of it all. The basis of their belief. I'm less inclined to think that people who say Jesus is their rock as I am to think their rock is really a single fragile hope that they'll get to see a particular favorite pet or relative who died when they were young and impressionable again. Or those who profess to have a personal relationship with God really just didn't have that great a relationship with their own Dad, an unspoken and morbid twist on the "god of the gaps" argument (gotta believe in a loving God because Daddy didn't love me enough...) Others are just such incredibly nasty personalities that believing in a God who forgives just by asking for it is some sort of twisted psychological necessity. Yet others must believe in a God to give existence itself meaning, not being imaginative enough to give life meaning on their own. The list goes on.

The traditional arguments only work on people like me, who were religious out of nothing more than habit and ignorance.

"Vox Day" shouldn't just be ignored. For the sake of intellectual honesty, he should be crushed. And that can only be done when you get to know him as a person, which means reading the book to see how it is he draws those wild conclusions he posts on that blog of his. Which is something I intend to at least take a stab at once I finish reading the book.

It's kinda like politics, nothing will ever change unless enough people get together and vote.

-Dominic Saltarelli

2. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #122597 by dsaltarelli on February 5, 2008 at 2:43 pm

It's that point of irrationality where one must switch gears. They do believe for a reason. Whether its a good reason or not is irrelevant, but I don't believe in magic, so I don't believe anyone is just magically religious.

To trot out my poor old roomie again, he explained his position best by starting with an observational basis for his theology. That basis was that he observed a complex purposeful universe. "God" is a basic fact of existence which explains not only why the universe is complex but why it has purpose. Which was my "Aha!" moment. So I forged ahead and started asking what the purpose of an eternal unchanging God was, and what could possibly be the purpose of an eternal existence?

It's been 4 days and he has yet to respond.

-Dominic Saltarelli

3. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #122551 by dsaltarelli on February 5, 2008 at 12:41 pm

Calling people "little BITCHES" was unwarranted, but it certainly gets attention, so I make no apologies. It's how I felt about the matter and that's that. I knew someone would read it eventually, but I read through the first 3 pages of posts and saw nothing but "this guy's an idiot, I'll never read such drivel" and thought to myself: "Everyone here should be licking thier chops." I'm still reading the book, and personally I find it damnably entertaining for my own reasons. I mean, how can you read a book that puts "bukkake" in its footnotes and not be entertained?

As far as the valuable perspective it provides, the biggest problem that atheists and theists have when it comes to communicating is the different basis for forming rationale and conclusions. Beale's caracature of the Enlightenment is an admission on what he believes and how he views not just the Enlightenment historically, but also, consequently, how this shapes his opinion of Enlightenment values. This perspective of the Enlightenment is where people in general get off on calling progress and reason religions in and of themselves. So if you want to have any type of meaningful discussion with someone who's less obnoxious than a Vox Day, the most beneficial course is to focus on what that person's impression is of the Enlightenment and correct any misconceptions thereof instead of getting into a pissing contest over who has superior values, which goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Beale's impression of the Enlightenment can be summed up with a quote from pg. 40.

"Despite how it is commonly portrayed by the New Atheists, the rationalist war on religion cannot properly be described as a war between science and religion; it is more akin to a tug-of-war between rationalists and religionists over the way in which science is to be henceforth used and the purposes to which science is ultimately harnessed."

As you can see, he's openly dismissive of the rationalist position because he views it as in no manner any more scientifically justified as the religionist position, just a social movement with no more or less of a basis than any religion.

I'll give an example of what I'm getting at. I have an old college buddy that I keep in touch with fairly regularly. He's deeply into Greek Orthodoxy, and at first glance you'd think he's just a spaced out hippie of a christian. But over the course of our discussions, he's revealed that his attitudes about religion are almost entirely shaped by his attitudes about history and the content of the historical record, the trustworthiness of the accounts of the earliest of early church "fathers". By focusing on the reasons why he finds thier accounts persuasive and the inherent suspension of his own ability to reason and implicit denial of his personal life experiences that are necessesary to take such accounts seriously, I'm starting to think I may be about to deconvert him. It's taking longer and longer for him to formulate responses to my emails.

Even supremely obnoxious or spaced-out theists can in fact be reasoned with, it's all a matter of getting to know them personally, and identifying precisely what thier basis for belief is that led them down the road to being obnoxious or spaced-out. I've found that it is always something from far out of left field that makes a religious person religious and why arguments never get anywhere, beacuse thier real basis for belief never gets touched.

-Dominic Saltarelli

4. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #122187 by dsaltarelli on February 4, 2008 at 9:52 pm

Jesus Christ on a Stick! Seventeen hundred posts! Haven't read hardly any, but I feel the need to say something. I've downloaded 'The Irrational Atheist' and I'm about a third through the book and I've spotted exactly 3 rather phenomenal gaffes so far. Should've wrote them down, but oh well. However, for the most part he's made some good points about being pragmatic and has given me a valuable alternative point of view regarding the esteem associated with Enlightenment values and why some people don't share them. I've also managed to lose some respect for the people on this forum when I compare this one with what he says. All I see here is complaints and callous dismission while he proudly parades his victories in the form of positive reviews (one from an atheist who was duly impressed after having actually read the book) and reposting ignorant responses he's gotten from his little "challenge". Damn people, he's written an entire book exposing the soft white underbelly of his myopic, hypocritical, mysogonistic soul. Instead of being such little BITCHES about how he's an annoying arrogant punk, try actually reading the book and taking him to task.

Here, I'll make it easy by providing an example (the first and thus most easily recalled gaffe).

"For a hypothesis to be falsifiable, it must be theoretically possible to make an observation that would disprove the subject. Atheists are particularly fond of this definition, as the difficulty involved in falsifying a supernatural God allows them to argue that religion cannot be science. But can Popper’s concept of falsifiability really be taken seriously as a dividing point between science and not-science? It appears more than a little flawed to me. Let’s begin with postulating that a study of the language of the gods is not proper science, whereas a study of the color of swans is. I base this premise on the classic example of a falsifiable proposition, the statement that “all swans are white.” The fact that one could prove this proposition to be wrong by observing a black swan makes it falsifiable and therefore a proper scientific matter. It is not the truth or untruth of the proposition that is important, only the fact that the truth or untruth could be determined by observation. The problem here is that the proposition “all gods speak Aramaic” is equally falsifiable, given that the theoretical observation of a monolingual Greek-speaking god would suffice to falsify the proposition. This would therefore make divine linguistics a legitimate matter of science, the current difficulty of observing gods notwithstanding. And however impossible it might seem to credit, divine linguistics has indeed been an object of serious contemplation throughout history by some of Mankind’s greatest minds, including Dante and Leibniz. Now, Popper would presumably describe this as “naïve falsification” and place “Swans, Color” in the category approved by sophisticated methodological falsification and “Linguistics, Divine” in the category not approved by it. But this merely expands the falsifiability test into a haphazard, technology-driven definition that dives
headlong into tautology, defining science as whatever scientists believe science to be at the moment, or worse, whatever scientists are doing."
-Vox Day "The Irrational Atheist" pgs. 30-31

The guy does things big. He's got brains and balls. So when he screws up and says something stupid, he doesn't just proverbially stub his toe, he chops his legs off.

-Dominic Saltarelli

5. The Moral Instinct

Comment #111035 by dsaltarelli on January 13, 2008 at 11:13 am

I've always wondered why there's even an argument over objective vs. subjective judgments. I've always viewed them as nothing more than labels which describe the point of reference from where the judgments are made. Objective morality is just a descriptive term that denotes a static point of reference from where moral judgments can be made. Similarly, subjective morality is just a term that describes a dynamic (situational) point of reference for making moral judgments. Cartomancer pointing out that the argument was purely semantic hits the nail on the head, I think.

As far as a static point of reference for making moral judgments existing... well, pick one, doesn't matter what. Find someone who agrees with you, and the two of you can share objective moral truths with each other. It's just a label.

I don't see what's so hard about this to grasp. Hell, you can say that illusions are objectively real because you're really experiencing an illusion. Seriously, what's all the fuss about?

6. Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster

Comment #91952 by dsaltarelli on November 29, 2007 at 3:54 pm

RD's motivation, it seems to me, is that he's looking to push as many envelopes as possible. First addressing religion with "Root of All Evil" and The God Delusion, then going after mysticism and new age beliefs in another series (I forget the name), and now he's slicing up yet another accepted social norm with an article questioning assumptions of sexual morality. Mayhaps the metaphoric cans of worms need to be opened up and addressed.

By openly questioning everything that's assumed true without question, there's the chance that people will then try to defend these assumptions, and once that happens, we find that most assumptions have rather shaky bases. The one's that stand up to scrutiny, then, will have proven thier merit.

-Dominic Saltarelli

7. Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith

Comment #69929 by dsaltarelli on September 13, 2007 at 7:55 am

What's funny about all of this, is I have two Muslim friends at work who swear up and down that being a Muslim means not hurting anyone, and that violence is considered a sin, either against yourself or against another. They're the "Islam is peace" types. I point to incidences like this, and they respond "Oh, they're probably a bunch of Shia..."

... LOL!

8. 'Jesus loves you' email

Comment #66239 by dsaltarelli on August 29, 2007 at 12:20 pm

Ahh, the convention. I bought a pass two months ago, only to be informed yesterday that they were overbooked and suddenly I'm on a "waiting list" and couldn't go. Then they tried selling me the password. Anybody else have that problem?

9. CNN Request for 'I-Reports' on religion

Comment #65260 by dsaltarelli on August 23, 2007 at 11:39 am

Here's what I sent. A bit spur of the moment, and I'm left wondering if someone else beat me to this little conclusion.

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I can proudly say that I have no 'faith' at all. Growing up, I think that I've developed enough intellectual integrity to hold my own beliefs to a uniform standard of honesty. It is the virtue of honesty to hold any sort of religous belief or religous feeling to the same standard by which any other percieved facts are to be held. And this same virtue, I think, can be considered the source of opposition to religion in modern society, because the consequences of dishonesty.... the wars, the suffering, the oppression imposed by our many and varied Machievellian princes, the evil deeds of those men of power whose very existences have become synonymous with lying and deception, have become all too real to the citizens of modern society. Religion now must defend itself, morally and intellectually, because it is a belief in a higher power, a greater force, much like the belief our princes have too long themselves enjoyed. It is no longer moral, or right, to simply believe, to have faith. It is the power people continue to give to despots with hollow promises, power which has been abused and is now being taken away by more and more skeptics, like myself, who feel that authority must prove itself. People are slowly banding together under the common belief that a noble leader must first prove themself noble before they can prove themself a leader.

Has God proven himself? Has faith, proven itself? The answer, is a very self evident... "No"
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