The banks are actually skating on thin ice right now because the Fed has kept them on life support for almost 5 years. So while they appear to be reaping insane profits, it is solely because of the printing presses and ZIRP.
Watch what happens when interest rates inevitably go up (which they're starting to do right now) and the Fed has to stop QE. All of the banks will instantly fail again when that happens.
Except that the Fed isn't going to just stop QE like all at once. They're going to slowly reduce the amount that they're buying month by month, and if it looks like there will be significant backlash because of a given reduction (or there is backlash from a given reduction), they'll stop.
Because I married my wife. My interpretation of her moon-goddess worship was completely different because I had the initial encounter, and so my reactions to observable events were radically altered by my previous encounter.
So then she, as well as any other gods/whatever, DO have the power to change objective reality.
No. Well, I suppose "indirectly". She changed objective reality insofar as she changed my subjective interpretation of events in a way that caused me to make a different decision. I honestly don't consider that "changing objective reality"; I consider it "changing subjective reality" in the same way that being Christian might inspire someone to go do missionary work helping victims of an earthquake. You might credit that to God's power over objective reality, but I doubt many others would -- it's credit to that person for believing in a continuity that impels them to do good works.
...?
You said yourself that you think your own belief is probably false.
I don't understand what you think you're saying here. Yes, my belief is probably false -- in the subjective sense of false, as in "there is no continuity here. There is only one person's belief." That doesn't mean it's wrong, useless, or worthy of abandonment.
Then shouldn't you pick a different group that offers what you DO want?
If I knew a group that had all of the current, mortal-life benefits, moral empowerment, and longsuffering-enablement that the Mormon church does without also having an afterlife that is meh, I'd go for it. I've tried a bunch of options; none of them worked.
If all she did was predict it, why does it matter? She has no impact. She may as well not exist, by your earlier reasoning.
Because I married my wife. My interpretation of her moon-goddess worship was completely different because I had the initial encounter, and so my reactions to observable events were radically altered by my previous encounter.
But if the individual in question believes their own belief is false...
...?
But if you were to jump in with a crowd that believed time and death do exist, then they would exist for you, right? Wouldn't you rather have an afterlife than not?
Yes to the first question, and to the second: I will have an afterlife according to my current continuity. It's just not all that interesting. I'm going to go hang out in the lowest rank of glory in the lowest of the three tiers of Heaven. Whoop! (This is because I don't pay tithings, because I don't support the Corporation of the President. I give my tithe in the form that more closely resembles zakat -- direct assistance to the poor people around me. The church doesn't recognize that as tithing, so I'm consigning myself to the 'worst' heaven. This is OK with me; I'm not actually sure based on the Scriptures that hanging out with God is what I want out of my eternity.)
If the subjective realities don't have any effect on the real world, how did your moon goddess manage to affect it? If the moon goddess had any power to make you and your wife end up married or whatever, then the John Frum should have the power to make cargo appear.p
Here we run into the classic conundrum. I don't interpret her has having affected the physical world, but rather predicted it. And what with time not existing as previously linked, and us not knowing the limitations of beings that exist in subjective continuities, I'm pretty OK with that.
An excellent question! I think that probably it doesn't, in fact, get a pass, and is false, insofar as no one other than me has any idea how to "do it wrong".
So...we all agree that it's false then. Thread over?
Well, my belief system wasn't ever the topic of the thread. I'm actually pretty disappointed that no people of any meaningful religious bent ever attempted to answer the question -- it's a pretty sad "Debate" when the only two sides are effectively "IDK because I'm the one asking the question", "No.", and "I don't care about the question, but you and your beliefs upset me so I'd rather talk about those things than the question itself."
There's also the whole thing where 'being false' doesn't keep someone from holding the belief. This is a very regular thing; almost every living person holds a few to mostly false beliefs. My wife, for example, believes that her mother loves her more than my mother loves me. That's false insofar as no one but her cares enough to hold that belief. A belief being false doesn't prevent it from having value to an individual, it only makes a statement about the belief's value in the grander sense.
Here's the thing: I'm not actually all that interested in the afterlife. Like I said somewhere before, it's a pragmatic insanity.
Why wouldn't you be interested in the afterlife?
Why would I be interested in the afterlife? If time and death both don't exist as previously linked, why worry about "the time after your death"? Isn't that a completely meaningless concern?
So you would say that personal experience isn't a good reason to believe in something, because things aren't true unless a critical mass of people believe in them, so the only way to be right is to pick a crowd and follow it?
That's kind of what I'm wondering. As mentioned, I didn't personally believe the moon goddess thing all that much until it was validated later in life. I don't know, however, if that kind of validation should constitute some form of 'greater truth' than simple number of beliefs. On the one hand, I have this powerful interpretation of the objective world that supports that subjective continuity. On the other hand, I have a total of two people -- my wife and I -- who have ever met this goddess if in fact it was the same goddess (though neither of us has ever really given the other option any credit.) I certainly don't have a strong enough idea of that continuity's rules to know how it could be "done wrong".
So I'm wondering if in fact the seeming ability of that story to accurately predict observable reality makes it strong enough to be worth believing in. Because if it hadn't, I wouldn't, straight up.
So let me ask you this - why don't cargo cults get cargo?
For the same reason that many Christians who pray for things don't get them: because a subjective continuity doesn't have any magical power over the observable world -- it only allows people to interpret their objective experiences. Any claim that a continuity makes over the objective world is a claim of interpretation, not a claim of 'power over'. All claims that continuities make of power over the physical world are made in order to allow them to further interpret events. (I.E. claiming that you have psychic power enables you to interpret future events as your being psychic.)
Cargo cults, like all religions, have methods of explaining away the lack of cargo when it doesn't come -- just like Christianity can explain away the lack of prayer fulfillment or Republicans can explain away the re-election of Obama. and just like I can explain away the fact that sometimes my wife hates me even though we both know we love each other.
Also, does your meta-belief in this whole system get a pass? Or is it only true if enough people buy into it (which I doubt is the case, so it'd therefore be false?)
An excellent question! I think that probably it doesn't, in fact, get a pass, and is false, insofar as no one other than me has any idea how to "do it wrong".
Also, shouldn't you pick a suicide cult? They tend to offer the best afterlife, and the quickest way there. If the things they believe are true, it seems like that'd be the best way to go.
Here's the thing: I'm not actually all that interested in the afterlife. Like I said somewhere before, it's a pragmatic insanity.
Quote from erimir »
How would your opinion change if these things could be found to all have physical correlates in the brain? What if we COULD measure personality through neuroimaging techniques in the future, for example?
If we could find a way to tell everything about a person by scanning his or her brain, I think we wouldn't have any debates like this anymore, so it would be irrelevant.
There's no evidence of any such spirit (meaning your version of the spirit).
Umm...duh? That's kind of the point of defining them as "not measurable by scientific methods." If they were measurable, we would have evidence.
How do you know that a spirit only experiences the objective world through its host body? You just said we can't observe it.
It's an inference based on the fact that a spirit interprets events in the physical world, which is axiomatic based on the observation that every person has their own interpretations of events in the physical world. If it couldn't observe the world, it wouldn't be able to interpret events.
How do you know a person has the same spirit at all times, rather than having a different spirit one day and another the next?
Because with the exception of deeply disturbed individuals or rare crises of faith, we all maintain the same (albeit slowly-evolving) internal explanations for events surrounding us across our lives. If we switched spirits every day, I might wake up tomorrow morning a conservative. That hasn't happened to me or anyone I know.
Quote from Ophidian Eye »
I have to take reality on faith, and I can't expect anyone else to interpret it for me.
That is an excellent way to sum it up, though I'd add that many people are more than happy to foist off the interpretation onto some pre-existing continuity that they're happy with.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
Of course you can observe people's moods, personalities, and histories. If you couldn't, you wouldn't know they were there. What's more, psychologists are getting pretty good at quantifying personality according to five factors,
What you are describing here is a subjective continuity where a group of scientists is interpreting their observations of other people's behavior by creating a subjective framework by which to do so. It's a perfect example of what I'm describing. The point I'm trying to make about spirits is that you can't observe them directly, through physical measurements.
and neurologists can even show us the physical and chemical causes of some personality traits - most famously, Phineas Gage became surly and impulsive after taking damage to his orbitofrontal cortex.
I have no doubt that there is a strong relationship between the physical body and the actions one takes. My wife, for example, has a malfunctioning adrenal gland and frequently has fight-or-flight reactions to relatively insignificant stressors. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a spirit as well. To put it explicitly, there is no known part of the body that causes someone to interpret events differently from someone else -- there are only parts of the body known to modify one's innate reactions to their interpretations.
The moment someone gets a bullet lodged in their brain and they suddenly completely switch up the way that they interpret the world, I'll be right there with you. But I've looked, and the only stories I can find are either "This injury affects his physical perceptions such that they act differently" (i.e. some brain damage keeps you from recognizing your spouse's face -- another argument for the spirit being limited to it's host body's perceptions), or "This injury affects his reactions to events, even though they still interpret them the same way" (i.e. my wife).
if I reject everything you just said as being pseudointellectual woo, do I get a new "spirit continuity" or whatever where everything you just said is false, including the bit about the formation of spirit continuities?
The latter. My personal answer is much more complicated and I honestly am about to walk out the door. I'll see if I can get back to you later. For the record though, yes, that answer does seem to indicate that personal experience is unreliable. Good catch.
I'd be interested to hear it.
OK, here's my answer. It doesn't matter if Joesph Smith lied, because enough people believed him that they formed a subjective continuity. Even though that continuity is based on a lie, it's well-formed, has it's own rules and definitions that are internally consistent, and it's possible to "do it wrong". That's the definition of a religion, the way I see it.
Here's what I mean by 'subjective continuity'. Every person is made up of more than just a physical body. They also have a goodly number of traits that cannot be measured by physical science. They have a base mood, a personality, a personal history -- absolutely none of which you can find by vivisecting, molecularly scanning, or otherwise observing them. Those things I'm going to call, for purposes of easy discussion, their "spirit", for lack of a less loaded term. A spirit is inherently detached from the observable, objective world -- the objective world cannot measure a spirit, and a spirit only experiences the objective world through it's "host body" if you will.
Each spirit effectively creates it's own continuity -- an explanation of the observable world that satisfies that person's need for explanations and gives that person a framework from which to build their belief systems and with which to base the actions that they decide to take.
Sometimes, two spirits' continuities are similar enough that they decide to join together, forming an overlapping continuity. This happens often in love. There's almost never a complete overlap ('soul mates'), but a significant partial overlap is enough to drive a lot of being together and being happy.
Sometimes, many spirit's continuities are similar enough in one regard or another that they form a larger subjective continuity that effectively takes on a life of it's own, bigger than but still made up of it's constituents. National identities like "American", religions like "Christianity", and so forth.
So long as a subjective continuity is large enough to be "done wrong", i.e. 'Mormons aren't Christians', it is true. The moment that whatever linguist it was recognized that it was possible to make a lolcat incorrectly, he effectively recognized lolcats as a form of subjective continuity that is true.
"True", of course, doesn't have the same meaning in an entirely subjective universe. (And every spirit is, effectively, it's own universe, in a solipsist kind of way. Every subjective continuity is also it's own universe in the same kind of fashion, even though they're not tied down to a single body in the way that a spirit is.) "True" in a subjective universe simply means "an accepted part of this universe", and "false" means the opposite.
The objective world that we can measure and experience obviously affects the subjective world in a not-quite-direct manner insofar as two people can experience an identical event and come away with very different perspectives and reactions to it. Similarly, each person's subjective world profoundly affects their objective world insofar as the only thing that really matters to any one person about things in the world is how they affect that person's subjective state. People can make claims to the contrary, but inevitably, all such claims boil down to "this makes me feel worse" or "this makes me feel better".
So you have, effectively, an objective, measurable universe that we all base our experiences on, and an infinite number of subjective, immeasurable universes that we all interpret those experiences in. No one person's subjective universe is capable of being "false" unless that person acknowledges that their interpretations of their own experiences are wrong -- we call those 'crises of faith', and they essentially represent the passage of one's spirit out of one subjective continuity and into another. Similarly, each subjective continuity is incapable of being "false" as a whole unless so few people adhere to it that it loses it's ability to be "done wrong", essentially shattering into many tiny bits none of which has a terrible amount of influence over the objective world.
That is why it doesn't matter if Joseph Smith lied. It's also how atheism and Christianity can both be true. Because in the end, the objective world that we all measure and can agree upon isn't actually the element of life that determines the validity, truth, usefulness, or even existence of those parts of life. Religion, national identity, neighborhood, political party, sports team affiliation, and all of those subjective continuities exist entirely within the immeasurable subjective spirit-space of billions of people; not "out there" at all.
So then your resounding answer to the question in the OP is "NO." There's never a good reason to believe in something because of a strictly subjective experience.
Right?
With exceptions for cases in which the thing to be believed is mundane or unimportant, and attempting to acquire further evidence may not be worth the effort.
OK, I can appreciate that. So, then, I'm assuming that you propose that you don't hold any such beliefs?
No, I think failure to tackle other criticisms is worrying too. But that fact doesn't give a pass on others.
OK.
The only argument you have to make in addition to all of the others is "God doesn't want science to provide evidence for Mormonism because He wants you to believe without evidence." Tah-dah! Seriously, all of you people are acting like this is some sort of challenging task, trying to deny one or two more bits of science in the face of an entire Bible full of science-defying stories.
I seriously don't even get it.
If that's your answer, doesn't that mean personal experience is unreliable? God is out to deceive us, and keep us from finding evidence, so that we'll believe on faith. As such, why should we trust personal experiences?
Is that your answer to the problem, or are you just providing a potential, hypothetical answer to demonstrate that they exist?
The latter. My personal answer is much more complicated and I honestly am about to walk out the door. I'll see if I can get back to you later. For the record though, yes, that answer does seem to indicate that personal experience is unreliable. Good catch.
Not the blazing stupidity of the TV station, mind you, but the actual prank in the first place. I keep hearing people refer to this as a 'racist' prank, but I just don't see it. To me that's like saying that "Herbie Hind" and "Hugh Jass" are racist. The only argument that's made sense to me is Colbert's, who said it's racist because they're clearly Chinese names and it's a Korean airline.
While ColonelCoo is a just as out there, ColonelCoo beliefs--I think--are a little more coherent. That is to say, they're more constant within their internal logic.
Yes, and I believe that that is true. And that all religions are true. Simultaneously. Sorry if that hurts your brain, but see, I don't particularly care. I have an explanation that works for me, and I don't need or care if you understand or like it.
What you're not comprehending here, Taylor, is that "an explanation that works for me" = "their internal logic", and you don't know either one. That's why it's a tough claim to make.
Irrelevant. The question remains: do you think that someone who has faith enough to believe in Christianity despite the arguments leveled against it is somehow going to be more moved against Mormonism simply because science disagrees with it?
This is a worrying amount of hand-waving. Each criticism should stand on its own. If you want to just dismiss them all with "faith so nyeh!" then I'm sure where there's room for personal experience to come into it, even. You should at least have the intellectual integrity to grapple with these criticisms, and approach them earnestly, whether you end up accepting them as valid or not.
So wait. It's not worrying that Christians regularly hand-wave things ranging from "X man lived to be 350 years old" to "three days of no sun didn't completely screw over the ecosystem so bad that it took decades to recover" to "there were Nephilim before the flood, Noah didn't take any Nephilim on the Ark, there were Nephilim after the flood" and so on, but when you tack on "some dude lied about some golden plates", it becomes worrying?
The only argument you have to make in addition to all of the others is "God doesn't want science to provide evidence for Mormonism because He wants you to believe without evidence." Tah-dah! Seriously, all of you people are acting like this is some sort of challenging task, trying to deny one or two more bits of science in the face of an entire Bible full of science-defying stories.
I seriously don't even get it.
Quote from erimir »
I find nothing remarkable about someone believing things with gigantic contradictions. I've witnessed it many times, and I'm witnessing it right now, talking to you.
That's a very different issue from whether such beliefs are justified and whether they are true.
Yes, it is. And I'm not particularly interested in the answer to that question here. If you want to start a thread about that question, feel free -- I'll participate. This, however, is not that.
In which case, why do you even care whether personal experience is a good reason to believe in something?
Because I have a vested personal interest in the outcome of the question.
Apparently, to you, pretty much anything is a good reason to believe in something.
That's not in any way a logical or even reasonable inference to draw from the statement that I don't give a crap whether Joesph Smith lied or not. The point is that my belief in Joesph Smith's honesty is irrelevant to the question at hand. It's nothing more than a transparent attempt to provoke a discussion that isn't the one that's framed by the thread. The reason that I don't give a crap is that it's irrelevant, not that it doesn't actually matter to me in my life.
Context is everything.
Weird for you to complain about Christians who believe differently from you in that case.
I don't complain about Christians who believe differently from me. I complain about Christians who believe differently from me and then try to force their belief structure onto society through the mechanism of politics. If they want to go hate gays in the corner and shut up about it, I'm fine with that.
Why do you need to be a Mormon to live the way you're living?
Because the Mormons around here are by far the best people around here, even if they are a little bit conservative for my liking. I want my child to grow up in the kind of atmosphere the Mormons create, and I want my family to be the kind of family that Mormonism encourages. I like the humility before God, the provident living, and the faith, and the effects that all of those things have on my life.
You're asking me, at least on some level, to agree that your beliefs are justified.
No, actually, I'm not. I don't care if you think my beliefs are justified. I don't need any social corroboration to continue holding my beliefs quite firmly and happily. I haven't even gone to any effort to explain my beliefs to anyone here other than to say 'I have a system that explains to my personal satisfaction how all religions can be simultaneously true, and I've chosen Mormonism out of pragmatic reasons because hell, if they're all true, why not pick the one that has the best effects on my life.'
I literally am incapable of caring less what any of your opinions are about that statement. I'm here asking a specific question that I think is relevant to both my life and the very nature of religious debate, and that question has zero to do with my belief system, no matter how fascinated and outraged y'all are by said system.
Atheism entails that your beliefs specifically are false. Including your whole wacky framework that makes it so that both Islam and Mormonism can be true.
You are rejecting logic if you believe that both A and (not A) can be simultaneously true.
Multiple-universe theory entirely disagrees with you.
Of course, I understand that. But the entire thread is about religion, subjective experience, and the wisdom of using one to support the other. Why would you even concern yourself about the "grand truth" in a thread that's designed from the ground up to concern itself with the wisdom and validity of an internal process applied to a completely subjective experience?
I think this is exactly the opposite of the right approach. We need to try to reduce the influence of our subjective experience as much as possible, so that we can cut through to the ground truth (or rather as close as possible). We can't dismiss that the ground truth is out there, even if we can't reach it, because then we've entirely lost direction.
So then your resounding answer to the question in the OP is "NO." There's never a good reason to believe in something because of a strictly subjective experience.
That's not how logic works. You do not simply say, "Well, every religion has its problems, therefore we just ignore all of them and just pick whatever we feel like."
Which is not what I said. You're very very fond of reading a little bit of what was said, deciding what it means, and then arguing against what you decided without actually paying complete attention to what was said and then arguing against that.
It is NOT that science has not been able to back up Mormonism. It's that science outright disproves Mormonism.
Irrelevant. The question remains: do you think that someone who has faith enough to believe in Christianity despite the arguments leveled against it is somehow going to be more moved against Mormonism simply because science disagrees with it? Might I point you to minor scientific disagreements with Christianity like the age of the Earth? Or the fact that the Bible alone contradicts itself on several dozen occasions, sometimes within the same book? If you're going to believe in science, logic, and the Bible simultaneously, you're already taking steps that make quibbling over Joe's lies look like child's play. And that's not tu quoque, because I'm not personally accusing you of anything. I'm making a broad, sweeping statement about the nature of religious people in general, myself included. Get your fallacies straight.
So again, are you going to even bother to address this, or are you just going to ignore it because to do otherwise would mean that you would have to be something other than lazy? Clearly, this is something you don't want.
I've already addressed it. Look real hard back in the thread and you'll find it.
I think, based on my gut, that all religions are true, and I've invented a very complex cosmology to explain how that all works out. I think, based on my gut, that it doesn't matter which religion you believe in, including atheism, because all religions, including atheism, are simultaneously true.
Atheism argues all religions are false.
Yes, and I believe that that is true. And that all religions are true. Simultaneously. Sorry if that hurts your brain, but see, I don't particularly care. I have an explanation that works for me, and I don't need or care if you understand or like it.
So basically, things are only mutually incompatible if we choose not to ignore logic and instead opt for a mindset in which no claim can possibly be declared false?
No, screw that. We're going with logic.
I love logic. I use it constantly. The fact that you don't know or understand the logical framework behind my worldview, yet insist on railing against it, is actually rather funny, and I hope you continue to do so. Epically.
You're also expecting me to take at face value (A) that this supposed moon goddess meeting happened at all, and (B) that you were totally sober and in your right mind when you decided to run naked through the woods.
Yes. Yes I am. But then again, I give exactly no ****s whether you do or not. It's a platform upon which to build a conversation. If you want to take it as a hypothetical and converse on that basis, go for it. If all you want to do is yell at me because you've decided to take a disliking to me personally, that's fine too. I'm great at ignoring personal attacks, as you saw before, and your opinion of me matters so little that I'm having trouble bothering to finish th
And you don't think the fact that you were running around naked in the woods pretending to be a high-level druid couldn't have influenced meeting a moon goddess?
The important part isn't the meeting with the moon goddess. The important part was that the claim made by the moon goddess was corroborated by events later in my life. Honestly, if that hadn't happened, I would have assumed that I was straight-up bat-**** crazy at the time (hell, I did assume that for just under a year, until I met my current wife and she told me she worshipped a moon goddess). So, yeah, what I was pretending in my head at the time is pretty irrelevant, all things considered.
Just to be clear before I reply in full, do you mean to draw a distinction between the term I've been using (ground truth) and your new term (grand truth)? I'm not sure if you intend to mean something different.
Nope, just misread what you wrote. I'm intending to use the same term.
"had experience, therefore X exists" is really only legitimate for cases where X is mundane. For anything where X is even the least bit extraordinary, "I had such and such experience" is pretty pitiful reason to believe it. Now, that's different than saying X doesn't exist. It might or might not, we just don't have enough evidence. And, depending on the nature of X, we might be well advised to keep our prior probability estimate rather low.
I'm of two minds here. On one hand, there are a goodly number of things that people consider terribly mundane that I still think are supported almost entirely by experience and little else (racism, conservative economic theory, and so on), so I'm not sure we should actually be setting the bar that high.
On the other, there are enough people who have had the same type of mystic experience, even if the details differ significantly, that it's difficult to entirely discount the entire class of "mystic experience" just because it doesn't jive with our current level of knowledge about the universe.
Except that the Fed isn't going to just stop QE like all at once. They're going to slowly reduce the amount that they're buying month by month, and if it looks like there will be significant backlash because of a given reduction (or there is backlash from a given reduction), they'll stop.
They're not stupid.
No. Well, I suppose "indirectly". She changed objective reality insofar as she changed my subjective interpretation of events in a way that caused me to make a different decision. I honestly don't consider that "changing objective reality"; I consider it "changing subjective reality" in the same way that being Christian might inspire someone to go do missionary work helping victims of an earthquake. You might credit that to God's power over objective reality, but I doubt many others would -- it's credit to that person for believing in a continuity that impels them to do good works.
I don't understand what you think you're saying here. Yes, my belief is probably false -- in the subjective sense of false, as in "there is no continuity here. There is only one person's belief." That doesn't mean it's wrong, useless, or worthy of abandonment.
If I knew a group that had all of the current, mortal-life benefits, moral empowerment, and longsuffering-enablement that the Mormon church does without also having an afterlife that is meh, I'd go for it. I've tried a bunch of options; none of them worked.
Because I married my wife. My interpretation of her moon-goddess worship was completely different because I had the initial encounter, and so my reactions to observable events were radically altered by my previous encounter.
...?
Yes to the first question, and to the second: I will have an afterlife according to my current continuity. It's just not all that interesting. I'm going to go hang out in the lowest rank of glory in the lowest of the three tiers of Heaven. Whoop! (This is because I don't pay tithings, because I don't support the Corporation of the President. I give my tithe in the form that more closely resembles zakat -- direct assistance to the poor people around me. The church doesn't recognize that as tithing, so I'm consigning myself to the 'worst' heaven. This is OK with me; I'm not actually sure based on the Scriptures that hanging out with God is what I want out of my eternity.)
Here we run into the classic conundrum. I don't interpret her has having affected the physical world, but rather predicted it. And what with time not existing as previously linked, and us not knowing the limitations of beings that exist in subjective continuities, I'm pretty OK with that.
Well, my belief system wasn't ever the topic of the thread. I'm actually pretty disappointed that no people of any meaningful religious bent ever attempted to answer the question -- it's a pretty sad "Debate" when the only two sides are effectively "IDK because I'm the one asking the question", "No.", and "I don't care about the question, but you and your beliefs upset me so I'd rather talk about those things than the question itself."
There's also the whole thing where 'being false' doesn't keep someone from holding the belief. This is a very regular thing; almost every living person holds a few to mostly false beliefs. My wife, for example, believes that her mother loves her more than my mother loves me. That's false insofar as no one but her cares enough to hold that belief. A belief being false doesn't prevent it from having value to an individual, it only makes a statement about the belief's value in the grander sense.
Why would I be interested in the afterlife? If time and death both don't exist as previously linked, why worry about "the time after your death"? Isn't that a completely meaningless concern?
That's kind of what I'm wondering. As mentioned, I didn't personally believe the moon goddess thing all that much until it was validated later in life. I don't know, however, if that kind of validation should constitute some form of 'greater truth' than simple number of beliefs. On the one hand, I have this powerful interpretation of the objective world that supports that subjective continuity. On the other hand, I have a total of two people -- my wife and I -- who have ever met this goddess if in fact it was the same goddess (though neither of us has ever really given the other option any credit.) I certainly don't have a strong enough idea of that continuity's rules to know how it could be "done wrong".
So I'm wondering if in fact the seeming ability of that story to accurately predict observable reality makes it strong enough to be worth believing in. Because if it hadn't, I wouldn't, straight up.
For the same reason that many Christians who pray for things don't get them: because a subjective continuity doesn't have any magical power over the observable world -- it only allows people to interpret their objective experiences. Any claim that a continuity makes over the objective world is a claim of interpretation, not a claim of 'power over'. All claims that continuities make of power over the physical world are made in order to allow them to further interpret events. (I.E. claiming that you have psychic power enables you to interpret future events as your being psychic.)
Cargo cults, like all religions, have methods of explaining away the lack of cargo when it doesn't come -- just like Christianity can explain away the lack of prayer fulfillment or Republicans can explain away the re-election of Obama. and just like I can explain away the fact that sometimes my wife hates me even though we both know we love each other.
An excellent question! I think that probably it doesn't, in fact, get a pass, and is false, insofar as no one other than me has any idea how to "do it wrong".
Here's the thing: I'm not actually all that interested in the afterlife. Like I said somewhere before, it's a pragmatic insanity.
If we could find a way to tell everything about a person by scanning his or her brain, I think we wouldn't have any debates like this anymore, so it would be irrelevant.
Umm...duh? That's kind of the point of defining them as "not measurable by scientific methods." If they were measurable, we would have evidence.
It's an inference based on the fact that a spirit interprets events in the physical world, which is axiomatic based on the observation that every person has their own interpretations of events in the physical world. If it couldn't observe the world, it wouldn't be able to interpret events.
Because with the exception of deeply disturbed individuals or rare crises of faith, we all maintain the same (albeit slowly-evolving) internal explanations for events surrounding us across our lives. If we switched spirits every day, I might wake up tomorrow morning a conservative. That hasn't happened to me or anyone I know.
That is an excellent way to sum it up, though I'd add that many people are more than happy to foist off the interpretation onto some pre-existing continuity that they're happy with.
What you are describing here is a subjective continuity where a group of scientists is interpreting their observations of other people's behavior by creating a subjective framework by which to do so. It's a perfect example of what I'm describing. The point I'm trying to make about spirits is that you can't observe them directly, through physical measurements.
I have no doubt that there is a strong relationship between the physical body and the actions one takes. My wife, for example, has a malfunctioning adrenal gland and frequently has fight-or-flight reactions to relatively insignificant stressors. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a spirit as well. To put it explicitly, there is no known part of the body that causes someone to interpret events differently from someone else -- there are only parts of the body known to modify one's innate reactions to their interpretations.
The moment someone gets a bullet lodged in their brain and they suddenly completely switch up the way that they interpret the world, I'll be right there with you. But I've looked, and the only stories I can find are either "This injury affects his physical perceptions such that they act differently" (i.e. some brain damage keeps you from recognizing your spouse's face -- another argument for the spirit being limited to it's host body's perceptions), or "This injury affects his reactions to events, even though they still interpret them the same way" (i.e. my wife).
Of course you do. Why wouldn't you?
OK, here's my answer. It doesn't matter if Joesph Smith lied, because enough people believed him that they formed a subjective continuity. Even though that continuity is based on a lie, it's well-formed, has it's own rules and definitions that are internally consistent, and it's possible to "do it wrong". That's the definition of a religion, the way I see it.
Here's what I mean by 'subjective continuity'. Every person is made up of more than just a physical body. They also have a goodly number of traits that cannot be measured by physical science. They have a base mood, a personality, a personal history -- absolutely none of which you can find by vivisecting, molecularly scanning, or otherwise observing them. Those things I'm going to call, for purposes of easy discussion, their "spirit", for lack of a less loaded term. A spirit is inherently detached from the observable, objective world -- the objective world cannot measure a spirit, and a spirit only experiences the objective world through it's "host body" if you will.
Each spirit effectively creates it's own continuity -- an explanation of the observable world that satisfies that person's need for explanations and gives that person a framework from which to build their belief systems and with which to base the actions that they decide to take.
Sometimes, two spirits' continuities are similar enough that they decide to join together, forming an overlapping continuity. This happens often in love. There's almost never a complete overlap ('soul mates'), but a significant partial overlap is enough to drive a lot of being together and being happy.
Sometimes, many spirit's continuities are similar enough in one regard or another that they form a larger subjective continuity that effectively takes on a life of it's own, bigger than but still made up of it's constituents. National identities like "American", religions like "Christianity", and so forth.
So long as a subjective continuity is large enough to be "done wrong", i.e. 'Mormons aren't Christians', it is true. The moment that whatever linguist it was recognized that it was possible to make a lolcat incorrectly, he effectively recognized lolcats as a form of subjective continuity that is true.
"True", of course, doesn't have the same meaning in an entirely subjective universe. (And every spirit is, effectively, it's own universe, in a solipsist kind of way. Every subjective continuity is also it's own universe in the same kind of fashion, even though they're not tied down to a single body in the way that a spirit is.) "True" in a subjective universe simply means "an accepted part of this universe", and "false" means the opposite.
The objective world that we can measure and experience obviously affects the subjective world in a not-quite-direct manner insofar as two people can experience an identical event and come away with very different perspectives and reactions to it. Similarly, each person's subjective world profoundly affects their objective world insofar as the only thing that really matters to any one person about things in the world is how they affect that person's subjective state. People can make claims to the contrary, but inevitably, all such claims boil down to "this makes me feel worse" or "this makes me feel better".
So you have, effectively, an objective, measurable universe that we all base our experiences on, and an infinite number of subjective, immeasurable universes that we all interpret those experiences in. No one person's subjective universe is capable of being "false" unless that person acknowledges that their interpretations of their own experiences are wrong -- we call those 'crises of faith', and they essentially represent the passage of one's spirit out of one subjective continuity and into another. Similarly, each subjective continuity is incapable of being "false" as a whole unless so few people adhere to it that it loses it's ability to be "done wrong", essentially shattering into many tiny bits none of which has a terrible amount of influence over the objective world.
That is why it doesn't matter if Joseph Smith lied. It's also how atheism and Christianity can both be true. Because in the end, the objective world that we all measure and can agree upon isn't actually the element of life that determines the validity, truth, usefulness, or even existence of those parts of life. Religion, national identity, neighborhood, political party, sports team affiliation, and all of those subjective continuities exist entirely within the immeasurable subjective spirit-space of billions of people; not "out there" at all.
OK, I can appreciate that. So, then, I'm assuming that you propose that you don't hold any such beliefs?
OK.
The latter. My personal answer is much more complicated and I honestly am about to walk out the door. I'll see if I can get back to you later. For the record though, yes, that answer does seem to indicate that personal experience is unreliable.
Not the blazing stupidity of the TV station, mind you, but the actual prank in the first place. I keep hearing people refer to this as a 'racist' prank, but I just don't see it. To me that's like saying that "Herbie Hind" and "Hugh Jass" are racist. The only argument that's made sense to me is Colbert's, who said it's racist because they're clearly Chinese names and it's a Korean airline.
Thoughts?
What you're not comprehending here, Taylor, is that "an explanation that works for me" = "their internal logic", and you don't know either one. That's why it's a tough claim to make.
So wait. It's not worrying that Christians regularly hand-wave things ranging from "X man lived to be 350 years old" to "three days of no sun didn't completely screw over the ecosystem so bad that it took decades to recover" to "there were Nephilim before the flood, Noah didn't take any Nephilim on the Ark, there were Nephilim after the flood" and so on, but when you tack on "some dude lied about some golden plates", it becomes worrying?
The only argument you have to make in addition to all of the others is "God doesn't want science to provide evidence for Mormonism because He wants you to believe without evidence." Tah-dah! Seriously, all of you people are acting like this is some sort of challenging task, trying to deny one or two more bits of science in the face of an entire Bible full of science-defying stories.
I seriously don't even get it.
Yes, it is. And I'm not particularly interested in the answer to that question here. If you want to start a thread about that question, feel free -- I'll participate. This, however, is not that.
Because I have a vested personal interest in the outcome of the question.
That's not in any way a logical or even reasonable inference to draw from the statement that I don't give a crap whether Joesph Smith lied or not. The point is that my belief in Joesph Smith's honesty is irrelevant to the question at hand. It's nothing more than a transparent attempt to provoke a discussion that isn't the one that's framed by the thread. The reason that I don't give a crap is that it's irrelevant, not that it doesn't actually matter to me in my life.
Context is everything.
I don't complain about Christians who believe differently from me. I complain about Christians who believe differently from me and then try to force their belief structure onto society through the mechanism of politics. If they want to go hate gays in the corner and shut up about it, I'm fine with that.
Because the Mormons around here are by far the best people around here, even if they are a little bit conservative for my liking. I want my child to grow up in the kind of atmosphere the Mormons create, and I want my family to be the kind of family that Mormonism encourages. I like the humility before God, the provident living, and the faith, and the effects that all of those things have on my life.
No, actually, I'm not. I don't care if you think my beliefs are justified. I don't need any social corroboration to continue holding my beliefs quite firmly and happily. I haven't even gone to any effort to explain my beliefs to anyone here other than to say 'I have a system that explains to my personal satisfaction how all religions can be simultaneously true, and I've chosen Mormonism out of pragmatic reasons because hell, if they're all true, why not pick the one that has the best effects on my life.'
I literally am incapable of caring less what any of your opinions are about that statement. I'm here asking a specific question that I think is relevant to both my life and the very nature of religious debate, and that question has zero to do with my belief system, no matter how fascinated and outraged y'all are by said system.
Multiple-universe theory entirely disagrees with you.
So then your resounding answer to the question in the OP is "NO." There's never a good reason to believe in something because of a strictly subjective experience.
Right?
Which is not what I said. You're very very fond of reading a little bit of what was said, deciding what it means, and then arguing against what you decided without actually paying complete attention to what was said and then arguing against that.
Irrelevant. The question remains: do you think that someone who has faith enough to believe in Christianity despite the arguments leveled against it is somehow going to be more moved against Mormonism simply because science disagrees with it? Might I point you to minor scientific disagreements with Christianity like the age of the Earth? Or the fact that the Bible alone contradicts itself on several dozen occasions, sometimes within the same book? If you're going to believe in science, logic, and the Bible simultaneously, you're already taking steps that make quibbling over Joe's lies look like child's play. And that's not tu quoque, because I'm not personally accusing you of anything. I'm making a broad, sweeping statement about the nature of religious people in general, myself included. Get your fallacies straight.
I've already addressed it. Look real hard back in the thread and you'll find it.
Yes, and I believe that that is true. And that all religions are true. Simultaneously. Sorry if that hurts your brain, but see, I don't particularly care. I have an explanation that works for me, and I don't need or care if you understand or like it.
I love logic. I use it constantly. The fact that you don't know or understand the logical framework behind my worldview, yet insist on railing against it, is actually rather funny, and I hope you continue to do so. Epically.
Yes. Yes I am. But then again, I give exactly no ****s whether you do or not. It's a platform upon which to build a conversation. If you want to take it as a hypothetical and converse on that basis, go for it. If all you want to do is yell at me because you've decided to take a disliking to me personally, that's fine too. I'm great at ignoring personal attacks, as you saw before, and your opinion of me matters so little that I'm having trouble bothering to finish th
The important part isn't the meeting with the moon goddess. The important part was that the claim made by the moon goddess was corroborated by events later in my life. Honestly, if that hadn't happened, I would have assumed that I was straight-up bat-**** crazy at the time (hell, I did assume that for just under a year, until I met my current wife and she told me she worshipped a moon goddess). So, yeah, what I was pretending in my head at the time is pretty irrelevant, all things considered.
Nope, just misread what you wrote. I'm intending to use the same term.
I'm of two minds here. On one hand, there are a goodly number of things that people consider terribly mundane that I still think are supported almost entirely by experience and little else (racism, conservative economic theory, and so on), so I'm not sure we should actually be setting the bar that high.
On the other, there are enough people who have had the same type of mystic experience, even if the details differ significantly, that it's difficult to entirely discount the entire class of "mystic experience" just because it doesn't jive with our current level of knowledge about the universe.