John Dub

There’s even a word for early readers of the scripture trying to figure out their own texts, pesher. It’s when then go through all the texts and try to connect them in ways they really aren’t connected. A well known one is the story in Isaiah of a young woman’s child and a specific King, that gets turned into a story of a virgin birth, so now we…[Read more]

Is anyone familiar with Bayes Theorem?

It’s a better description of how a probability can be found than just adding up summaries of papers. It relies on that established data, and calls it “prior probability”. You find other “priors” that are similar to what you are investigating and the percent of that turned out to be accurate is your “prior”.…[Read more]

There so much here that intrigues me, but then I remember that I’ve tracked down references like this and ended up being disappointed. I would need to hear something I hadn’t heard before if I was to look these up and pursue them. I’m not sure if you are pointing that out, or pointing to the use of words by these people that show how Genus Homo…[Read more]

Glad you got the uniqueness of fundamentalism out there right away.

Not sure if the average believer would catch all the subtlety in your final few paragraphs. I should mention a little while back you said something about “not wanting to argue” about proofs, or something like that. I get that, whatever I said I was using some shorthand for the…[Read more]

Nice work. Even though I’ve heard the timeline analogy before, but when the humans finally arrive in this “pageant” you really get the sense of how were are just part of a long line.

Where in this shuffling milieu of complicated ideas and traditions is there a place for the free thinking mind of an individual who’s trying to answer the fundamental question of how,if and why he or she is connected to that ultimate reality?

I think they are working on that at CERN.

I’m not advocating for religion. I’m advocating for the centr…

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I’m afraid we’re slowing getting to where all believer/non-believer discussions get. The questions get too difficult. Once you’ve created something with attributes that aren’t based on facts, it gets difficult to answer any questions about that something. The answers are ad-hoc, or new attributes have to be created on the fly. The discuss…[Read more]

That was an amazing string of cliches

Scientists are always examining  evidence and are trained to be skeptical of everything. This statement could be signed by most scientists including Charles Darwin himself.

That’s why every now and then Sherlock says something like “what’s the big deal”. It’s a variation of “hey, I’m just asking questions”. A friend of mine does with conspiracy…[Read more]

My guess is that these people believe this to be a novel and radical approach when it’s not, it’s a bunch of cobbled ideas from past philosophies.

You sound like a different person in this thread. Here, you’ve identified the very thing we talk about everywhere else, but you don’t seem get. That when people find something that they like and see…[Read more]

Back to the Genus conversation. I agree with your objections Tee, it’s just not where I want to go. Convincing Genus that God doesn’t exist is about as likely as convincing Sherlock that whatever he is trying to say is messed up. The missing part of the conversation that I’ve recently been finding more about is kind of hard to describe, something…[Read more]

It sounds like Berger’s Social Construction of Reality. Pretty standard science.

Tim, as yet, I haven’t seen this “locked forum” thing. If a post marked as spam is at the top of a forum, it can be out on the index as the latest post, so if you click it, it goes nowhere, but if you click the forum title, then you’re in. Annoying, but that’s my work around.

Well, that was, long. I understand why you wanted to spend so much time driving home the idea that you are science based, so I’m not going to question that. That we are made of star stuff, that we are born with the desire to care for each other and that we are a web of energy are all science based statements you have made that also resonate with t…[Read more]

Not gonna argue with the links Tee. Anyone checking in, be sure to read them, not just the headlines.

At the time, it probably saved me from further deterioration into my various addictions, but at a cost of learning some over simplified coping mechanisms and social skills. The skills worked great within the group, and they crossed over with…[Read more]

He has preserved them, what we have is the result of that preservation, scribes faithfully copying, as I mentioned there is very little in the way of changes across the centuries.

Bart Ehrmann has a great story in one of his books about the early scholars who rode out into the deserts looking for the ancient Greek manuscripts way back before…[Read more]

I did Landmark before it was Landmark. In 1938 its was called est, then later, The Forum. I haven’t been in a workshop for 25 years or so. On their website somewhere is survey results, showing that most people benefit from it. I’m not sure it’s for you though. It uses Buddhist and other philosophies, but they don’t always reference them, they just…[Read more]

It just gets more comical as it goes on doesn’t it. I can’t believe he posted the “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”, a particularly non-scientific document. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scientific_Dissent_from_Darwinism

And I know wikipedia isn’t science either, but if I posted something from a skeptic org, or from a science org, he’d…[Read more]

I cleared the latest one

for example:

Yeah, don’t recommend coming to a skeptics forum and claiming that the Bible is accurate history. But, you’re call.