Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[RobbyPants]

Well, yes. Most things designed by people tend to have a lot of flaws or at least potential flaws; however, when people talk about ID, they're usually looking for a way to use pseudoscience to justify their beliefs and then they shoehorn in their own god of choice after the fact.

Most religious people (at least that I know) don't see their god as some guy bumbling around through trial and error, or something. Most justifications for why the world is so shitty involve an uber-powerful god that has a master plan that we don't understand or who works in mysterious ways or something similar. This is because they want a god who's really powerful and is all loving. I've yet to hear any serious postulating on some guy who's just trying his best, but is otherwise, not very good at his job.

So, yes, it's true that there could be a semi-retarded designer out there for whom there's no evidence, but since there's no evidence for it, I'm not going to worry about it.

[tzor]

Glancing only briefly at various sites devoted to this rather strange notion, it appears that most of the people who claim to push “Intelligent Design” are not per se trying to push for the “divine watchmaker” or even creationism (although by default most are not opposed to either) but instead are pushing against the “complete random” nature of misunderstood Darwinian Evolution. It’s more of an objection to “evolution proves god doesn’t exist” type atheists. A lot of them, basically boil down to “I don’t know what this intelligence is, but it’s definitely not completely random.”

I am not going too deeply into the religious arguments (most of which I would be arguing in the negative) especially given the general utopist attitudes in this board. I also generally disagree with the principles of intelligent design in general.

However, I do believe that the complex chemical complex of living cell DNA is capable of responding to a variety of complex and changing situations in a manner that could easily be described as a simple artificial intelligence dedicated towards its goals (which are not the same as our goals). It’s clearly not perfect (a good example is cancer cell formation), but it is, as they say, “good enough for government work.”

[DSMatticus]

would not suggest that there is no "intelligent design" in any of my company's products even if some things just don't make a damn bit of sense to me.

The people in your company are not omniscient. Intelligent design is invoked with reference to a creator who is omniscient. An omniscient being does not make design 'mistakes' at all, because that would imply there is something he did not know. Omniscience is the additional detail here that you are omitting, and when we account for that detail your comparison falls apart. If I ask, "why is this software like X when Y is clearly superior?" you can say, "the design team did not realize Y is superior." If I ask, "why did god design our body like X when Y is superior?" you can't say "god did not realize Y is superior." That is contradicting the basic definition of the Judeochristian god.

When Christian propaganda machines came up with the name "intelligent design" for their bullshit non-theory, they chose it because it was deliberately misleading in a lot of ways. They aren't actually proposing intelligent design, they are proposing omniscient design. To disprove omniscient design, all you need is a single design flaw and it goes right out the window. That, or god becomes an asshole. Either one is bad for the proponents of omniscient design.

Glancing only briefly at various sites devoted to this rather strange notion, it appears that most of the people who claim to push “Intelligent Design” are not per se trying to push for the “divine watchmaker” or even creationism (although by default most are not opposed to either) but instead are pushing against the “complete random” nature of misunderstood Darwinian Evolution. It’s more of an objection to “evolution proves god doesn’t exist” type atheists. A lot of them, basically boil down to “I don’t know what this intelligence is, but it’s definitely not completely random.”

No, that's not the story of intelligent design, at all, and you know it isn't. Intelligent design started as a counter to the introduction of evolution into highschool biology here in the good ol' U.S., because the idea that god did not personally handcraft man contradicts Christian values. It exists to be a direct refutation of the idea that evolution is sufficient to explain complex life. Intelligent design contains arguments like "irreducible complexity," and "specified complexity," which specifically posit that evolution cannot be the sole origin of life because ____. (They are both retarded).

Intelligent design is incompatible with evolution, because intelligent design is about claiming that evolution is actually an intelligently guided process. The argument about whether or not evolution and god are compatible is completely separate from a discussion about intelligent design.

tl;dr Evolution, as a theory, eliminates the necessity to invoke God to explain our existence. This scares Christians, so they started looking for bullshit pseudo-science ways to claim evolution has to have an intelligent creator behind it. They call this bullshit pseudo-science, collectively, "intelligent design."

[fectin]

Well, yes. Most things designed by people tend to have a lot of flaws or at least potential flaws; however, when people talk about ID, they're usually looking for a way to use pseudoscience to justify their beliefs and then they shoehorn in their own god of choice after the fact.

Most religious people (at least that I know) don't see their god as some guy bumbling around through trial and error, or something. Most justifications for why the world is so shitty involve an uber-powerful god that has a master plan that we don't understand or who works in mysterious ways or something similar. This is because they want a god who's really powerful and is all loving. I've yet to hear any serious postulating on some guy who's just trying his best, but is otherwise, not very good at his job.

So, yes, it's true that there could be a semi-retarded designer out there for whom there's no evidence, but since there's no evidence for it, I'm not going to worry about it.

As a quick answer, we label the extremes of our experience. If the worst things that ever happened were stubbed toes, we would still bemoan the cruelty of a god that allowed the horrors of toe-stubbing. There are right now in Haiti children who think the epitome of culinary delight is sunbaked mud cookies with a bit of sugar in them. I suspect they are thankful for the 'blessing' of being able to eat mud.

The argument about whether a loving god could allow bad things to happen is a fundamentally meaningless argument. If there is enough differentiation on your scale to allow for good things, there must also be enough to allow for bad things.

[RobbyPants]

As a quick answer, we label the extremes of our experience. If the worst things that ever happened were stubbed toes, we would still bemoan the cruelty of a god that allowed the horrors of toe-stubbing. There are right now in Haiti children who think the epitome of culinary delight is sunbaked mud cookies with a bit of sugar in them. I suspect they are thankful for the 'blessing' of being able to eat mud.

The argument about whether a loving god could allow bad things to happen is a fundamentally meaningless argument. If there is enough differentiation on your scale to allow for good things, there must also be enough to allow for bad things.

What?

The fact that some of us bemoan toe stubbing while others extol mud pies should be proof enough that the world is pretty shitty in a lot of ways. I question why a loving deity capable of doing anything about it would be cool with that.

[DSMatticus]

The argument about whether a loving god could allow bad things to happen is a fundamentally meaningless argument. If there is enough differentiation on your scale to allow for good things, there must also be enough to allow for bad things.

Suffering totally has an objective element to it, because its biological roots are to be a system which can identify when bad things are happening to you and your body, and the bad things it is keyed to find are fairly quantifiable. If people no longer went hungry, there would be objectively less suffering in the world. We wouldn't end up adjusting our expectation of suffering such that a hundred years from now we replace charities to fight world hunger with charities to give well-fed but dessertless kids in Africa ice cream. There are certainly relative aspects to it, but it is grounded at least partially in something objective and quantifiable.

Buuut even moreso, there's something to be said about this:

If the worst things that ever happened were stubbed toes, we would still bemoan the cruelty of a god that allowed the horrors of toe-stubbing.

The idea of a benevolent being who creates the biological capacity for pain and suffering at all is very strange. What possible function, in the grand scheme of god's plan, does you having the ability to hurt your toe serve? Couldn't we just not have that going on? What does my ability to starve to death slowly and painfully add to the universe that a benevolent god felt necessary? Any suffering at all, trivial or grand, is inconsistent with benevolence.

Also, while also interesting, suffering isn't really the reason intelligent design is stupid; the human body isn't a flawed design because of its capacity to suffer in strange and unusual ways, it is a flawed design because by any possible metric you can imagine it's mechanically inferior (except for the metric of "perfectly simulating a design produced by evolution," which is... a god of a very small gap).

[Maj]

The idea of a benevolent being who creates the biological capacity for pain and suffering at all is very strange. What possible function, in the grand scheme of god's plan, does you having the ability to hurt your toe serve?

Well, maybe stubbing your toe tells you to watch where you put your feet so you can avoid more serious injuries.

Biology is a system of checks and balances - when something goes wrong with your body, you get an alert. That alert can be pain, being tired, being hungry, being thirsty... None pleasant, but all necessary for your body's systems to keep functioning. I don't get why that's stupid/bad/demonstrative of a lack of intelligence/whatever.

You could be a rock instead, and avoid all the travails of biology and its systems, but then you don't get root beer or sex or message boards. Personally, I find that toe-stubbing, stomach flu, dentists, loneliness, being poor, and reading message boards are totally worth orgasms, aloo gobi, Christmas, my family, my friends, the smell of a forest after it rains, and the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

But that's just me.

[Whatever]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital ... ty_to_pain

Not feeling pain is super bad for you, and usually leads to moderate to severe injury and early death. Given the world we live in, pain is still quite important. If you couldn't stub your toe, you would end up breaking it instead.

That's not to say that pain is great, it's just necessary given the various terrible things that can happen to us, like injury, starvation, and death. Take all those away and you could remove pain too.

[Kaelik]

Well, maybe stubbing your toe tells you to watch where you put your feet so you can avoid more serious injuries.

Which totally makes sense for why evolution would result in toe stubbing being painful.

But if you don't think it's possible for an omnipotent and omniscient god to create a human body that is incapable of generating enough force to hurt itself while still accomplishing any goal worth accomplishing, then your god is extremely tiny.

I could design such a human right now, and no part of the form your legs take has fuck all to do with the parts of being human that actually should matter to god.

[DSMatticus]

Biology is a system of checks and balances - when something goes wrong with your body, you get an alert. That alert can be pain, being tired, being hungry, being thirsty... None pleasant, but all necessary for your body's systems to keep functioning. I don't get why that's stupid/bad/demonstrative of a lack of intelligence/whatever.

Given the world we live in, pain is still quite important. If you couldn't stub your toe, you would end up breaking it instead.

My alarm clock goes off in the morning, and I get up. My alarm clock doesn't punch me in the face. You don't have to build warning systems around the concept of pain or suffering. You don't even have to get rid of injury, starvation, and death to do this. We were designed such that the order of events was bad thing -> paid/suffering -> learn to avoid. There's absolutely no reason you can't design something to skip the pain/suffering process and go straight from bad thing -> learn to avoid. After all, no AI algorithm feels pain yet they can still categorize inputs as "okay" and "avoid."

Pain is a strictly unnecessary design element to the process of learning to avoid bad things. Bad things do not have to be painful. If you assume intelligent design, someone chose pain as a learning mechanism for what to avoid. That makes them sadistic, not benevolent, because they created a capacity for suffering where literally none need exist.

And you can totally have orgasms & ~pain. They're neurologically distinct processes. You really can have the good parts of human biology without the bad.

[Whatever]

Okay, let's imagine a world with negative consequences for actions (injury, death), but without pain. We learn to avoid situations that can lead to injury or death, via some form of mental input. So we stub our toe, and learn to avoid smashing our foot into walls. That's either our brain telling us "this is bad" or we skip consciousness entirely and our brain just refuses to do whatever it was the next time around.

If the former, we have a minor injury (the stubbed toe) coupled with a negative feeling (avoid this).

What is pain again? The widely used definition is "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage".

So yeah, that's still pain.

If the latter, we lose the ability to stub our toe if we want to. So now we can't play soccer. We can't jump into a freezing lake to save someone from drowning. Sometimes we want to do thing that are painful anyway, even though they will hurt.

I'm not arguing for intelligent design here, the world is a pretty messed up place. But to say that pain is "strictly unnecessary" is a really hard claim to make, unless you just change your definitions.

[Kaelik]

If you are omnipotent, it's actually strictly unnecessary. Nothing about being able to be hurt is actually good. We could all be made of magic adamntium that mobilizes itself through the power of will, and we could totally just not be capable of being hurt.

In which case, there is no reason for pain, because you actually can't physically hurt yourself, so you never need to feel pain to know to avoid something.

Of course, there is also the point that something which might fit some definitions of pain, but is still way more awesome than our current versions.

For example, I feel bad when I see someone else being hurt, but that's not generally considered pain, and I felt only that way when I was hurt myself, that would be sufficient, but less total pain. Or as DM said, you could be in a state of constant orgasm that is removed or lessened when certain actions occur, and enhanced when you do others. That would be fine.

[fectin]

I don't understand why anyone would bother arguing against the existence of something which cannot be disproved.
Within that, I don't understand why anyone would choose such shitty arguments. We have a truly profound capability to normalize our experiences. If you want a model of a world without pain, read The Giver, if you want constant pain, read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Reactions are startlingly blase in both cases (and if you want to argue that those are unrealistic or simplified, propose a better model which is substantively different).

If people no longer went hungry, there would be objectively less suffering in the world. We wouldn't end up adjusting our expectation of suffering such that a hundred years from now we replace charities to fight world hunger with charities to give well-fed but dessertless kids in Africa ice cream. There are certainly relative aspects to it, but it is grounded at least partially in something objective and quantifiable.

Are you sure? For example, how long would you say it should take from the end of actual, no-kidding slavery before we start grumbling just as strongly about wage-slavery? Between attacking straight up apartheid-style segregation and attacking segregation based on circumstance?
A Raisin in the Sun covers exactly this topic, and covers it well.

Also, while also interesting, suffering isn't really the reason intelligent design is stupid; the human body isn't a flawed design because of its capacity to suffer in strange and unusual ways, it is a flawed design because by any possible metric you can imagine it's mechanically inferior (except for the metric of "perfectly simulating a design produced by evolution," which is... a god of a very small gap).

Intelligent design is a real, scientific theory. That's great, and I am all for turning hypotheses testable. At this point though, it has about as much going for it as phlogiston. If your theory is that there's some imperceptible being pulling the strings, great. That's not testable, and is about as useful as the dreaming butterfly theory. If you also theorize that evolution cannot be sufficient to explain modern species, and predict that there are gaps in the evolutionary chain which are not explicable by evolution, that is great! That is a real test for that theory! And who knows, maybe we were all secretly touched by His Noodley Appendage. In the meantime though, burden of proof is always on the affirmative, and intelligent design has failed to provide that proof.

That is entirely separate from the existence of god, which is inherently untestable.

[RobbyPants]

But if you don't think it's possible for an omnipotent and omniscient god to create a human body that is incapable of generating enough force to hurt itself while still accomplishing any goal worth accomplishing, then your god is extremely tiny.

This is usually the approach I see people take when they're trying to reconcile theodicity. They want their god to be all loving, but they're willing to make concessions (sometimes quite large concessions) in the all powerful and all knowing department.

That, or they try to re-define evil or suffering in such a way as to rationalize why this exact amount of suffering in the world is somehow necessary or worse yet, the best of all possible worlds. That last one always cracks me up.

I don't understand why anyone would bother arguing against the existence of something which cannot be disproved.

I don't understand why anyone would bother arguing for the existence of something that cannot be proven.

[Kaelik]

I don't understand why anyone would bother arguing against the existence of something which cannot be disproved.

If I asserted that I am actually a collective of 9 people composed of eight races, 3 genders, and 9 sexual orientation/gender patterns, that would be, like all things about the identity of someone on the internet, not disprovable by you.

None the less, I am sure you would fail to believe that, and when I justify my opinion on X on how I am this collective, you would reject that it was justified, and you would do so by presenting an inductive argument that it is extremely unlikely that I am such a collective.

And because no one has an emotional attachment to the idea that I am a collective, no one will whine about how they don't see why you would bother arguing against something which cannot be disproved.

But because people, such as you, have an emotional attachment to belief in god, you get all upset and whiny when people make inferential arguments about why God is unlikely.

[DSMatticus]

and you would do so by presenting an inductive argument that it is extremely unlikely that I am such a collective.

This is fallacious. The argument for why you are unlikely to be a collective is rooted in evidence, which we can use to create a certain amount of certainty when going from the general case to the specific case. Any discussion about the existence of god(s) similarly has to depend on evidence about gods. In the context of religion, that's a trivial task. Religions posit facts about their gods that give us grounds to dismiss them. But theism is infinitely broader than all disproven religions, and you really can't make the inductive leap from disproving Christianity to disproving god in general. There's no relation between the number of disproven gods and possible gods that you can use to go from general to specific with any certainty whatsoever.

Don't get me wrong. Believing in god is fucking stupid, because at its best it's literally the belief "everything we've observed about the universe AND this other completely unrelated claim which adds no information to our model." But claiming to have valid logical arguments for the refusal of all possible gods doesn't actually hold up. Weak atheism is an appropriate position, because it's the application of Occam's razor to our model of reality and it tells people who are adding unnecessary details to shut the fuck up. Strong atheism is adding those very same unnecessary details with a negation sign in front of them. You tell people who say "spaghetti monster!" to shut the fuck up. You tell people who ask "spaghetti monster?" to stop having useless discussions. The existence or non-existence of the spaghetti monster adds no predictive power to the model of the universe, so we discard the fucking question right off for the useless steaming pile of shit that it is. We don't answer it negatively.

tl;dr "What if there's a god?" is a question with all the scientific and philosophical significance of "what if this is the matrix?" We can't prove the negative or positive of either, but we don't care because they're both stupid useless questions. Even correct answers don't change anything.

If you want a model of a world without pain, read The Giver, if you want constant pain, read I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

Those are fictional stories. Admittably, we're both totally in the realm of hypotheticals, but I think there's more argument for a partially biologically objective basis for human suffering than The Giver.

Are you sure? For example, how long would you say it should take from the end of actual, no-kidding slavery before we start grumbling just as strongly about wage-slavery? Between attacking straight up apartheid-style segregation and attacking segregation based on circumstance?

All of those things were genuinely god awful (hah!) things that caused a great deal of suffering. The debt-enforced slavery that followed slavery was actually more lethally violent than being a slave (emphasis: lethally). You're actually saying, "here are a series of not-improvements where people kept grumbling just as loudly. Human suffering is relative."

You can definitely make the case that people keep trying to improve the world (not with that particular example, because that whole era is a mixed bags of steps forward, steps back, and having your legs broke), but "constant drive for improvement, ergo constant suffering," doesn't hold up. Hell, if one day we are so out of problems we are concerned about whether or not kids in Africa have ice cream, that's great, but I don't think anyone's going to confuse the ice cream crisis with world hunger in their personal reference frames. There is an objective, biological difference between going hungry and missing dessert, and I don't think it is possible that people would ever put the same suffering label on world hunger and the great ice cream crisis due to shifting relative experience because they are just not biologically the same thing. One actually fucking hurts.

[Kaelik]

and you would do so by presenting an inductive argument that it is extremely unlikely that I am such a collective.

This is fallacious. The argument for why you are unlikely to be a collective is rooted in evidence, which we can use to create a certain amount of certainty when going from the general case to the specific case. Any discussion about the existence of god(s) similarly has to depend on evidence about gods. In the context of religion, that's a trivial task. Religions posit facts about their gods that give us grounds to dismiss them. But theism is infinitely broader than all disproven religions, and you really can't make the inductive leap from disproving Christianity to disproving god in general. There's no relation between the number of disproven gods and possible gods that you can use to go from general to specific with any certainty whatsoever.

And you are still an idiot. No one believes in an undefined thing. To the extent that any specific definition of a god exists, the analogy holds. If you personally refuse to define the subject of discussion, that's your fault.

I mean, if I wanted, I could say:

If I asserted that I am actually a alsdldfhashdfgklbfdlbadsfk, that would be, like all things about the identity of someone on the internet, not disprovable by you.

None the less, I am sure you would fail to believe that, and when I justify my opinion on X on how I am this alsdldfhashdfgklbfdlbadsfk, you would reject that it was justified, and you would do so because there is no good reason to believe anything at all about an undefined value.

And because no one has an emotional attachment to the idea that I am a alsdldfhashdfgklbfdlbadsfk, no one will whine about how they don't see why you would bother arguing against something which cannot be disproved.

The reason I didn't is because I was talking to fectin not you. Fectin does have a definition of god in his head, and because he has such a definition I can point to the fact that certain inferences indicate that that definition is not true. Unlike you, were you purposefully refuse forever to even imagine the concept of bothering to define the topic of discussion, and therefore every single word out of your mouth is a waste of everyone's time.

[DSMatticus]

What the fucking fuck? There is no undefined thing being discussed here.

I don't know what the fuck you think you're doing. Are you trying to play some semantical game where you reject any definition of god too minimalist to disprove, therefore you don't have to deal with the fact that you can't disprove the minimalist definitions when you're claiming no god exists? Protip; you haven't actually addressed the assertions other people are making when you do that! You are just pretending those assertions are irrelevant.

So fucking explain to me how the sole claim "a conscious, omnipotent, omniscient entity exists" is irrelevant to a discussion about god, or show me how you can disprove its existence using only those premises. Because those are the two fucking options you've left yourself with your shitty argument.

P.S. yes, you have a valid basis for telling anyone who claims "a conscious, omnipotent, omniscient entity exists" that they are stupid. But that is different for having a valid basis for rejecting their claim as false. They are stupid for making an evidenceless assertion, not for making a provably false one.

[Kaelik]

Once again, I never asserted that it is provably false. I asserted that there are a variety of inductive arguments we can make that decrease the likelihood that it exists.

For example, we can look at what consciousness is, and we can notice that consciousness in all observable states is mutually exclusive with omniscience, and therefore hypothesize that it is likely (though not definite) that any omniscient entity would not be conscious as we see it. That would be one of the many examples of how any definition of god, once adhered to, could by inference be determined unlikely.

[PoliteNewb]

If I asserted that I am actually a collective of 9 people composed of eight races, 3 genders, and 9 sexual orientation/gender patterns, that would be, like all things about the identity of someone on the internet, not disprovable by you.

None the less, I am sure you would fail to believe that, and when I justify my opinion on X on how I am this collective, you would reject that it was justified, and you would do so by presenting an inductive argument that it is extremely unlikely that I am such a collective.

Nah, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give a shit. Which is how you should be about people who believe in God, as long as their not cramming their holy dick down your throat.

And because no one has an emotional attachment to the idea that I am a collective, no one will whine about how they don't see why you would bother arguing against something which cannot be disproved.

But because people, such as you, have an emotional attachment to belief in god, you get all upset and whiny when people make inferential arguments about why God is unlikely.

I believe in God, but don't get all butthurt when people point out that God is unlikely. I get a little irritated when people try to cram their atheist dick down my throat, by claiming I'm an imbecile to believe in God, even when my belief has absolutely zero impact on anyone but myself.

[DSMatticus]

Making inductive claims (as valid as it ever is) really depends on the relatedness of the items you're discussing. It isn't at all clear that there's a meaningful relationship between human consciousness and whatever nebulous thing we're describing when we call god conscious. You're generalizing across a major change in discussed objects. Mismatched grouping gives bad induction; generalizing from statements about penguins to all birds, for example, would lead to a lot of incredibly wrong statements about birds said with a whole lot of apparent certainty.

I get a little irritated when people try to cram their atheist dick down my throat, by claiming I'm an imbecile to believe in God, even when my belief has absolutely zero impact on anyone but myself.

You're positing a claim without significant evidence. I'm not going to hate or prosecute you for it, but yeah, I think it's dumb. I bet you think scientologists are dumb, and you're right.

I think most of the hostility on the topic comes from the fact that institutionally (as in, not you or your personal beliefs, but the beliefs advocated by the Christian institutions of the world to its members, which you may not agree with at all), your religion is ruining tens, hundreds of millions of lives right now and holding back the progress of humanity and that is not even an exaggeration that is the depressing reality of it. And they do this while claiming "my religious beliefs are sacred; respect them!" and people go, "oh, damn. He said the r-word! We have to listen to him."

Atheists want society to adopt a disrespect for religion because it will be healthy for us. When Rick Santorum starts babbling about how important following God's will is for America, and everyone gets up and leaves the room in disgust, that will be a better world. And I think you agree with me when I say that (or I'm giving you far too much credit). Maybe you're an innocent victim in that particular battle, but I personally don't mind if you get your feathers ruffled because people stop respecting your particular brand of baseless assertion because it's the R-word if it means that when Christian instititutions tell us how bad contraception is we collectively tell them to shut the hell up and fuck themself.

It's not about you needing to suck Atheist dick; it's about calling this religious justification bullshit for what it is. Religion is not something that is intrinsically entitled to respect. When Christians advocate terrible things for Christianity, society should not say, "it's okay because it's for Christianity," we should say "fuck you, that's terrible," and our refusal to do just that gives a shit ton of power to these insane evangelicals.

</end rant>

P.S. I'm not laying any of the blame for this at your feet as an individual Christian. But I do blame your demands for passive acceptance and respect. No. Being able to call religions on the terrible shit they do is important for our progress as a society, so you don't get to have your beliefs respected just for throwing around the R-word.

[Kaelik]

Making inductive claims (as valid as it ever is) really depends on the relatedness of the items you're discussing. It isn't at all clear that there's a meaningful relationship between human consciousness and whatever nebulous thing we're describing when we call god conscious. You're generalizing across a major change in discussed objects.

Oh I see, so when you said that god was a conscious entity, you meant that the consciousness of god is nothing like regular consciousness. And I bet the entitiness of god is nothing like regular entitiness either. So I guess what you really meant when you defined god was "god is a ;lkasdkd;lkakadsf with omnipotence, omniscience, and alfkjd;alskdj."

Hey look, that's more like the DSM I know, as soon as you presented a definition, I showed how inductively it is unlikely that such a thing exists, and you responded by asserting that god is a special magic undefined thing, and therefore no one is allowed to draw any inferences about the likelihood of a conscious god at all, because god conscious is magic undefined consciousness that shares no traits with any other consciousness that we could possibly know about.

Guess what, if god's consciousness is nothing like mortal consciousness, then it's not consciousness, it's alfkjd;alskdj.

[sabs]

I especially love how the same people who talk about how Civil Law needs to reflect God's Law will completely FREAK OUT if you mention Sharia Law.

Even though that's fucking what Civil Law reflecting God's Law actually is.
It's not that Atheists try to ram their dicks down your throat. It's that Atheists are sick and tired of having to suck yours, because you're a precious little hothouse flower whose entire morality and beliefs can't survive a light rain shower.

it's 2012 and Christians are still trying to ram creationism and prayer in school. They cry about religious freedom, but have no trouble trampling on everyone else's religious beliefs.

Christianity is not inherently more right than any other religion, including Norse and Greek religions of the past. It's effectively Mythology that people still believe in.

[tzor]

I especially love how the same people who talk about how Civil Law needs to reflect God's Law will completely FREAK OUT if you mention Sharia Law.

Even though that's fucking what Civil Law reflecting God's Law actually is.

Actually it's not. Parts of the Sharia is and parts are not.

Legal scholar L. Ali Khan claims that "the concept of sharia has been thoroughly confused in legal and common literature. For some Muslims, sharia consists of the Quran and Sunnah. For others, it also includes classical fiqh. Most encyclopedias define sharia as law based upon the Quran, the Sunnah, and classical fiqh derived from consensus (ijma) and analogy (qiyas). This definition of sharia lumps together the revealed with the unrevealed. This blending of sources has created a muddled assumption that scholarly interpretations are as sacred and beyond revision as are the Quran and the Sunnah. The Quran and the Sunnah constitute the immutable Basic Code, which should be kept separate from ever-evolving interpretive law (fiqh). This analytical separation between the Basic Code and fiqh is necessary to dissipate confusion around the term sharia."

As the Arab News article points out at lot of things (whcih we normally associate with Sharia law is actually tribal law and in fact against Islamic teaching.

I'm not going to quote the article because quoting part of the article does it a great injustice. But you can ee in the comments that there is a good example how Sharia law may in fact violate the principle teachings of the religion it purports to come from.

[violence in the media]

Wow. A No True Scotsman defense of religious law from Tzor. Who could have seen that coming?