Before any quotes, I'll give my own overarching point: Life without a higher purpose may be ultimately meaningless (I'll get more into what sense I mean), and that makes life more difficult than if there were ultimate meaning, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of the existence of Yahweh. You cannot derive Yahweh's existence (or any deity or pantheon) from your claim that life is easier that way. [Edit: Turns out I never actually get to that conclusion in my comments below, so you might as well address it here, but after you've read the rest.]

The point was never that a meaningless Universe makes life more difficult; you simply decided that was the point. The point the video makes, and which I have also been making, is that you are suffering from cognitive dissonance by having no ultimate justification for your value system, but living as if you do. You admit that under atheism the Universe is meaningless, and so we've been debating on whether you can find any justification for a value system in a meaningless Universe. The explanation you have ultimately given me is that you believe there is a right and wrong, and people do have value, because you feel it. Do you realize this proves what I have been saying all along?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the term used in modern psychology to describe the state of holding two or more conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously.

Your atheism tells you that life without God is meaningless. Your feelings tell you that life is meaningful. These are two conflicting cognitions. Instead of realizing that and re-evaluating your atheism, you say that you don't know why and you don't care. That is the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

But the fact is that somehow, in the context of my own little 80-year microblip in the lifespan of our planet, I do care. I just do. I have nothing more than a pet theory about why I care. I care, and I care a lot. I suppose I'm somewhat curious as to why I care, but it's not of primary importance for me to know. I just do, and it's pleasing to notice that just about everyone else around me does too. The only question for me is how to follow this desire of mine to be good given my circumstances.

The facts are simple: the existence of God explains everything that you feel about wanting to do good, and the love that you have for people and life, and your atheism denies it. Yet you embrace what is contrary to your own experience.

And why should I reject being a slave to chemicals? The chemicals MAKE ME FEEL GOOD, remember? Should I purposefully do things that make me feel bad? Why on Earth would I even consider it? Ridiculous.

So if it makes you feel good its okay to be a slave? You don't mind being enslaved to a mindless irrational process because you get rewarded for it like a rat activating a feeder?

I reject the description that I live my life "as a Christian does", as if Christians invented or have some original claim being good. All humans, regardless of faith or lack thereof, believe in the value of humans (or, any societies that don't value humans go extinct very quickly). We all generally shun murder and violence, foster mutual care, enjoy one another's company, feel protective, have a soft spot for babies and so forth, and have been doing all of this as a species since before Christianity began.

So I would turn it around and say instead that it's Christians who go about their lives living like normal humans, but thinking they're being good because their religion tells them to.

Most people in this world (around 85 - 90 percent) are theists. If we are going to talk about universal belief in this world then it is theism which is normal. That is historically where our morality comes from. Everyone who believes in God has an ultimate justification for right and wrong, but atheists do not. So I will modify this and say that you're living like a theist does but denying it with your atheism.

I can claim that I have a stronger sense of what's right and wrong than the psychopath simply because they are defined as lacking that sense (or, perhaps non-psychopaths are defined as people having that sense). And you're right that I do not claim that my way of determining which actions are appropriate is inherently superior to the psychopath's. As it happens, my way of determining morality puts me among the overwhelming majority, and so it's relatively easy for me to mitigate the negative impacts of people like that by identifying and avoiding them. I don't say that my way should be preferred to the pshychopath's; I just notice that it is, and I'm grateful for that, and for the fact that psychopathy is not a choice.

Actually, psychopaths do know right from wrong, but they don't care.

In any case, what you're saying here contradicts your later claim that my hypothetical about a society approving of child rape is ridiculous, and proves my point. You admit here that you couldn't say that your way of morality is superior to psychopathy, it just so happens that there are more of you than there are of them. You name that as the reason why your way should be preferred. Therefore what you're talking about is a herd morality.

Now think about if the situation were reversed and psychopaths were in the majority. Your version of morality would no longer be preferred, and psychopaths would no longer need to conform to your standards; you would need to conform to theirs. Whatever was normalized in a psychopathic society would be what was called good and whatever the psychopathic society rejected would be called evil. This is proof that everything I said was true. The entire point of my example was to show that if we simply have a herd morality where the majority tells us what is good and evil, then if the majority ever said child rape is good it would be. This is simply a fact. Whether you think it could happen or not is relevent to the point.

You're drowning in a sea of relativism, where a justifies b and b justifies c and c justifies d, and this goes into an infinite regress.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you give an example of a justification to infinite regression that would cause some kind of problem unique to non-thesitic morality?

I'll get to this later.

I don't accept that it's any more natural to worship Yahweh than some other deity or pantheon or idol, and I can't imagine how you could justify such a position without referring to dogma. Ask a Muslim. He'll tell you with the same conviction that Allah is the natural way and show you his own dogma. 100 years ago, a Japanese would have told you it was natural to worship the Emperor, and today he'd say it's natural to worship ancestors. My point is that any worship will satisfy our natural urge to worship, which is why almost all people worship something, and the object of worship you're brought up around is the one you're most likely to be comfortable with worshipping, naturally.

The reason I said this was in reply to your assertion that we developed religion because it answered questions and made us feel comfortable. My point was that we all come pre-programmed with a need for worship, which you apparently agree with. That is what is natural to us. It has nothing to do with whether it is more or less natural to worship Jesus. It is actually more natural for us to rebel against God because of our corrupt nature. It's only through personal revelation that we direct our worship in the right direction.

People don't naturally conclude life is meaningless; they know from their experience that it is very meaningful. They are taught it is meaningless through philosophy and the ennui that comes from modern life. You will never find a population of natural atheists anywhere on the planet.

The problem —and one that I fell into myself— is the conflation of two senses of the word "meaningless". For example, I can say without conflict that the planet and humanity is doomed and so forth, so our actions are ultimately meaningless, AND that interacting with people gives meaning to my life. Now, in the first sense, I mean there's no teleological purpose to my life. In the second sense, I mean certain people and things in my life give fulfillment/bliss.

The sense we agreed upon and have been discussing is that that life without God is meaningless. In this sense, it is still equally meaningless whether human civilization implodes or doesn't implode. Therefore the meaning you derive from your feelings is only an illusion created by chemical reactions in your brain.

Your anecdotal evidence about depression doesn't make you an authority on *the single cause* of depression. Some depressives follow your pattern, and others don't. I don't. When I'm depressed, my feeling isn't hopelessness. In fact, these days, I'm feeling rather hopeless, but I'm not depressed.

You can feel hopeless and not be depressed, but the source of the depression is almost always hopelessness. I'll give you some examples. If you put all of the worlds depressed people in a very large room, and gave each of them a check for 10 million dollars, you will have instantly cured around 80 percent of them. The majority of depression comes being stuck in a bad situation that you don't feel like you can change, situations that cause a lot of stress and unhappiness. A lot of money buys a lot of change. Many of the rest are probably depressed because of health issues, and if you could offer them a cure (hope), they would be cured as well. The remainder are probably depressed because of extreme neurosis. There are other causes of depression but you see my point. Hope is the solution to depression.

It's not my hope. I believe that dead is dead. Much simpler than your belief. Much more likely too. You're implying that I'm following some faulty reasoning about the afterlife. Among the things I don't know are an *infinite number of possibilities* of what could happen in the afterlife, one of which is your bible story. My best guess is nothing. Since nobody's ever come back from the dead to talk about it (Did nobody interview Lazarus? What a great opportunity missed!), nobody knows, so there's no reason to speculate about it ever. Your book says whatever it says, and I don't care because to me it's fairy tales. I'd have to be an idiot to live my life differently because of a book I didn't first believe in. Just like you'd be an idiot to live like a non-believer if you believe so much in Yahweh.

On what basis do you say your belief is more likely?

Someone has come back from the dead to talk about it: Jesus Christ. You don't have to believe the bible; you can ask Him yourself. You say there is no reason to speculate (ever); now that is an interesting statement from someone who believes in open inquiry. What you've said is actually the death of inquiry. And let's be clear about this; you have speculated. You are basing your conclusion on no evidence but merely your atheistic presuppositions about reality. You say no one has come back but one man has, but of course you dismiss the account as fantasy (again because of your atheistic presuppositions).

I would also ask how you think the brain understands the complex moral scenarios we find ourselves in and rewards or doesn't reward accordingly? Doesn't that seem fairly implausible to you?

It's quite plausible. I'm no biologist, but I'm sure there's a branch of evolutionary biology that deals with social feelings. My own pet theory is that these feelings are comparable to the ones that control the behaviour of all communal forms of life, like ants and zebras and red-winged blackbirds. It's evolution, either way, IMO.

Of course anything is possible when you summon your magic genie of evolution. "Time itself performs the miracles for you."

What makes someone a bad person?

In the absolute sense, religious faith, only, can bring that kind of judgement as a meaningful label.

In the relative sense where I would colloquially refer to someone as "a bad person" (my prime minister, Stephen Harper is an example), I mean someone who has shown they are sufficiently disruptive to other people's happiness due to acting too much in their own self-interest that they're best removed from influence and then avoided. But I would only use that term as a shorthand among people who knew that I don't moralize absolutely.

So no one is really bad?

Do you think this could have something to do with the fact that the bible says you should do things you don't want to do, or that you should stop doing things you don't want to stop doing?

An interesting question, but no. I don't believe it because everything I see points all religion being a human invention.

Well, I'm fairly sure you've told me before that you hate the idea of God telling you what to do.

Your hypothetical is an appeal to the ridiculous. It simply is a fact that just about everyone —including child rapists, I'm guessing— believes that child rape is wrong for the simple reason that it severely hurts children. If it increases a person's suffering, then it's wrong. I can think of nothing simpler. Your hypothetical is like one where a passage in the bible prescribed child rape. Would it be OK then? Does the bible that say that rape is wrong? Does it say you cannot marry a child?

I've covered this above, but I will also add that if we had evolved differently, then in your worldview, all of this would be moot. We are only in this particular configuration because of circumstance, and not design. It could just as easily be 1000 different other ways. There could easily be scenarios where we evolved to exploit children instead of nuture them.

In both cases, you didn't address my point. 1) I'm stating that Yahweh's laws are far, far more complex than secular morality. You countered that Yahweh's laws were as simple as Jesus' two rules. I showed that was wrong with my AIDS in Africa example (condoms saving lives). You can address that, or you can agree that Yahweh's laws are more complex that Harris' model of secular morality.

I hope I don't need to point out that the bible says nothing about condoms. Gods morality is really as simple as the two greatest commandments because if you follow those you will follow all the rest:

Romans 13:9-10

The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

When you love your neighbor and love God you are basically doing the whole law right there. There are some particulars that can emerge in different situations just like we have laws for different situations, and so Harris would have to accommodate those as well.

2) I also pointed out that Jesus gave us a moral model that requires the individual to determine for themselves based on fixed criteria what's good and what's not. "… as you would have your neighbour do unto you…" implicitly requires the individual to compare their actions with what they themselves would want someone else to do to them. That means relying on their own understanding. This contradicts your other statements that we shouldn't rely on our own understanding. You see? To follow Jesus' second law, you must rely on your own understanding.

Yes, in this case we would rely on our own understanding, as informed by the biblical worldview. What scripture is saying when it says "lean not on your own understanding" is that we make God the Lord of our reasoning. So, when we think about doing unto others, we would think about it in the context of how Jesus taught us to behave.

[you:]What about all of Pagan societies throughout the ages that sacrificed their children to demons?

You're making my point for me. Paganism is religion. Non-believers would never justify a habit of killing their own children.

Yes they would:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,880,00.html

So your answer is yes? You think that without religion, society may decide torturing babies is good because it decided that killing Jews was good?

[me:]If you think I’m being ridiculous, what do you think is more likely: that a society somewhere will suddenly realize that they feel just fine about torturing babies, or that a society somewhere will get the idea that it’s their god’s will that they torture babies? Human instinct is much more consistent than the will of any gods ever recorded.

Yes, I think an entire society could end up agreeing on something that depraved, just like the ancient Greek society approved of paedophilia. You also act as if I am trying to defend all religion, which I'm not. There are plenty of sick and depraved religions out there, and religions can easily corrupt a culture, like islam has done to the Arab culture.

In any case, there are many examples of non-believing societies doing sick and depraved things to their populations. Millions of Christians were murdered by communists in the 1940's and 50's. I highly recommend you read this book:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gracealoneca.com%2Fsitebuildercontent%2Fsitebu
ilderfiles%2Ftortured_for_christ.pdf&ei=PSNiUIyTCsPqiwLYtYGQCw&usg=AFQjCNG-ro4rM7dfvFCkgIvjnmgdhQnSPA&cad=rja

The fact is, in a meaningless Universe you simply can't prove anything without God. You actually have no basis for logic, rationality, morality, uniformity in nature, but you live as if you do. If I ask you how you know your reasoning is valid, you will reply "by using my reasoning".

You're slipping back into solipsism. We agreed not to go there. I'm not going to answer any of those things.

Now you're just trying to duck the issue, and perhaps you don't understand what solipsism is, because this is not solipsism. Solipsism is the belief that only your mind is sure to exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

What I am talking about is right in line with the video. Without God you don't have any ultimate justification not just for any kind of value, but even for your own reasoning. It is a direct implication of a meaningless existence. This is what I mean about a justifies b justifies c justifies d into infinity. You have nowhere to stake a claim which can justify anything which you experience, or even your own rationality. If you feel you do, please demonstrate why you believe your reasoning is actually valid.

>> ^messenger:

stuff

@shinyblurry


We seem to be getting into a lot of repetition in this thread, so rather than going line by line, I'm going to attempt my points and reactions to yours with fewer quotes, hopefully hitting the important themes. I don't want to minimize anything you've said, so if I skip anything you feel is a separate issue and is cogent, feel free to draw my attention back to it specifically, but check first and see if you can't answer that same point with something I've already said in here.

Before any quotes, I'll give my own overarching point: Life without a higher purpose may be ultimately meaningless (I'll get more into what sense I mean), and that makes life more difficult than if there were ultimate meaning, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of the existence of Yahweh. You cannot derive Yahweh's existence (or any deity or pantheon) from your claim that life is easier that way. [Edit: Turns out I never actually get to that conclusion in my comments below, so you might as well address it here, but after you've read the rest.]

My overarching point is to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance inherent in your position ... if this world is not under the sovereign control of God, it is doomed to destruction ... You live as a Christian does, judging what is good and evil … these are just chemical reactions in your brain … why be a slave to chemicals?… you have no rational justification for … saying your sense of right and wrong is any better than the psychopath, or that yours should be preferred.

There's no cognitive dissonance in my mind –at least, not about doing the right thing. I acknowledge a life without God has no ultimate purpose, and that in the grand scheme of things, the Earth is going to be swallowed by the Sun in a few billion years and nearly all traces of humanity will disappear with it, and at that time, nothing anybody has ever done will matter because there will be nobody left for whom it can matter. With that in mind, it does seem odd that despite realizing this, I would still care about doing the right thing.

But the fact is that somehow, in the context of my own little 80-year microblip in the lifespan of our planet, I do care. I just do. I have nothing more than a pet theory about why I care. I care, and I care a lot. I suppose I'm somewhat curious as to why I care, but it's not of primary importance for me to know. I just do, and it's pleasing to notice that just about everyone else around me does too. The only question for me is how to follow this desire of mine to be good given my circumstances.

And why should I reject being a slave to chemicals? The chemicals MAKE ME FEEL GOOD, remember? Should I purposefully do things that make me feel bad? Why on Earth would I even consider it? Ridiculous.

I reject the description that I live my life "as a Christian does", as if Christians invented or have some original claim being good. All humans, regardless of faith or lack thereof, believe in the value of humans (or, any societies that don't value humans go extinct very quickly). We all generally shun murder and violence, foster mutual care, enjoy one another's company, feel protective, have a soft spot for babies and so forth, and have been doing all of this as a species since before Christianity began.

So I would turn it around and say instead that it's Christians who go about their lives living like normal humans, but thinking they're being good because their religion tells them to.

I can claim that I have a stronger sense of what's right and wrong than the psychopath simply because they are defined as lacking that sense (or, perhaps non-psychopaths are defined as people having that sense). And you're right that I do not claim that my way of determining which actions are appropriate is inherently superior to the psychopath's. As it happens, my way of determining morality puts me among the overwhelming majority, and so it's relatively easy for me to mitigate the negative impacts of people like that by identifying and avoiding them. I don't say that my way should be preferred to the pshychopath's; I just notice that it is, and I'm grateful for that, and for the fact that psychopathy is not a choice.

You're drowning in a sea of relativism, where a justifies b and b justifies c and c justifies d, and this goes into an infinite regress.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Can you give an example of a justification to infinite regression that would cause some kind of problem unique to non-thesitic morality?

People worship because they're made to worship … 1 Romans says that God has made Himself evident to people in the things He has made. So, rather than people worshiping because they wanted to avoid meaninglessness, they worship because it the most natural thing for them to do which matches their experience.

I don't accept that it's any more natural to worship Yahweh than some other deity or pantheon or idol, and I can't imagine how you could justify such a position without referring to dogma. Ask a Muslim. He'll tell you with the same conviction that Allah is the natural way and show you his own dogma. 100 years ago, a Japanese would have told you it was natural to worship the Emperor, and today he'd say it's natural to worship ancestors. My point is that any worship will satisfy our natural urge to worship, which is why almost all people worship something, and the object of worship you're brought up around is the one you're most likely to be comfortable with worshipping, naturally.

People don't naturally conclude life is meaningless; they know from their experience that it is very meaningful. They are taught it is meaningless through philosophy and the ennui that comes from modern life. You will never find a population of natural atheists anywhere on the planet.

The problem —and one that I fell into myself— is the conflation of two senses of the word "meaningless". For example, I can say without conflict that the planet and humanity is doomed and so forth, so our actions are ultimately meaningless, AND that interacting with people gives meaning to my life. Now, in the first sense, I mean there's no teleological purpose to my life. In the second sense, I mean certain people and things in my life give fulfillment/bliss. If by "natural atheist" you mean people who have no supernatural practices including ancestor worship or anything, then yes, you're right, I don't believe such a society exists. To me, this points to the universal human tendency to worship something—anything, and to feel better about life when we do so. Slaves to chemical reactions in their brains, as far as I'm concerned.

I can speak on depression because I used to be depressed. I know what it is like, and having come out of it, I am qualified to speak on what I can clearly see as being the number one issue; hopelessness.

Your anecdotal evidence about depression doesn't make you an authority on *the single cause* of depression. Some depressives follow your pattern, and others don't. I don't. When I'm depressed, my feeling isn't hopelessness. In fact, these days, I'm feeling rather hopeless, but I'm not depressed.

If someone feels it right to hurt and steal from you, who are you to tell them that they ought not to do that?

I would never say that someone "ought not to do" anything on objective moral grounds. If I ever said something like that (I wouldn't use the words "ought" or "should"), it would be on the understanding that this person either knows the local laws and is violating them, or more likely shares a moral foundation with me, is acting against it. Either way, that person, upon consideration, would probably prefer not to be doing that mean thing, and is only doing it to satisfy some other need of theirs that they consider higher than their need to do the right thing by me. (This isn't to justify the bad act, but to show you how I think about bad acts and the people who do them. In other words, I don't believe people get encouraged by Satan or anything to do bad things.)

[me:]There’s nobody who’s going to judge my soul when I’m dead, so in that sense, once I’m dead, it won’t matter to me in the least what I do now once I’m dead because I’ll be dead.

[you:]You say this with certainly but I think you have to recognize that this is your hope. I wonder where this hope comes from? Since you've never been dead before to see what happens, what makes you so sure about it? Could this information about life after death exist in the 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 percent of things that you don't know?

It's not my hope. I believe that dead is dead. Much simpler than your belief. Much more likely too. You're implying that I'm following some faulty reasoning about the afterlife. Among the things I don't know are an *infinite number of possibilities* of what could happen in the afterlife, one of which is your bible story. My best guess is nothing. Since nobody's ever come back from the dead to talk about it (Did nobody interview Lazarus? What a great opportunity missed!), nobody knows, so there's no reason to speculate about it ever. Your book says whatever it says, and I don't care because to me it's fairy tales. I'd have to be an idiot to live my life differently because of a book I didn't first believe in. Just like you'd be an idiot to live like a non-believer if you believe so much in Yahweh.

I would also ask how you think the brain understands the complex moral scenarios we find ourselves in and rewards or doesn't reward accordingly? Doesn't that seem fairly implausible to you?

It's quite plausible. I'm no biologist, but I'm sure there's a branch of evolutionary biology that deals with social feelings. My own pet theory is that these feelings are comparable to the ones that control the behaviour of all communal forms of life, like ants and zebras and red-winged blackbirds. It's evolution, either way, IMO.

What makes someone a bad person?

In the absolute sense, religious faith, only, can bring that kind of judgement as a meaningful label.

In the relative sense where I would colloquially refer to someone as "a bad person" (my prime minister, Stephen Harper is an example), I mean someone who has shown they are sufficiently disruptive to other people's happiness due to acting too much in their own self-interest that they're best removed from influence and then avoided. But I would only use that term as a shorthand among people who knew that I don't moralize absolutely.

Do you think this could have something to do with the fact that the bible says you should do things you don't want to do, or that you should stop doing things you don't want to stop doing?

An interesting question, but no. I don't believe it because everything I see points all religion being a human invention.

Your atheism leaves you in the position of not being able to tell me that something like child rape is absolutely wrong. In your world, there is no such thing, and if everyone thought it was right, it would be.

Your hypothetical is an appeal to the ridiculous. It simply is a fact that just about everyone —including child rapists, I'm guessing— believes that child rape is wrong for the simple reason that it severely hurts children. If it increases a person's suffering, then it's wrong. I can think of nothing simpler. Your hypothetical is like one where a passage in the bible prescribed child rape. Would it be OK then? Does the bible that say that rape is wrong? Does it say you cannot marry a child?

[me:]Yahweh’s morality is nowhere near as simple as a secular morality. Where in those two commandments of Jesus does it say that using condoms or allowing same-sex couples to marry is wrong? In fact, saving lives, preventing unwanted pregnancies and allowing all loving couples to get married are ways to love your neighbour, and they’re exactly what I would want my neighbour to do or advocate for on my behalf.

[you:]God wrote His commandments on our hearts, which is the reason your feelings tell you what is right and wrong.

And elsewhere…

[me:]First, you’re talking in circles. If Harris’ model of morality is arbitrary, then so is Jesus’ model of “do unto others…” because they amount to pretty much the same thing, and what one person wants his neighbours to do may not be the same as someone else’s, etc. At some level, we’re going to have to determine for ourselves what’s right and what’s not.

[you:]We have the freedom to obey or disobey God. The one thing God will never do is make you obey Him. In that sense, you have to determine whether you will do what is good or evil.

In both cases, you didn't address my point. 1) I'm stating that Yahweh's laws are far, far more complex than secular morality. You countered that Yahweh's laws were as simple as Jesus' two rules. I showed that was wrong with my AIDS in Africa example (condoms saving lives). You can address that, or you can agree that Yahweh's laws are more complex that Harris' model of secular morality. 2) I also pointed out that Jesus gave us a moral model that requires the individual to determine for themselves based on fixed criteria what's good and what's not. "… as you would have your neighbour do unto you…" implicitly requires the individual to compare their actions with what they themselves would want someone else to do to them. That means relying on their own understanding. This contradicts your other statements that we shouldn't rely on our own understanding. You see? To follow Jesus' second law, you must rely on your own understanding.

[me:]Third, do you picture a world where everyone suddenly agrees that torturing babies is OK? Do you really believe that without religion people have absolutely no internal direction whatsoever, and will accept torturing of babies as acceptable? I don’t. So, no, Harris’ moral system does not allow for the possibility of torturing babies.

[you:]This is really an argument from incredulity. I'm sure no one pictured an entire society could be convinced that killing millions of jews is a good thing, but it happened.

So your answer is yes? You think that without religion, society may decide torturing babies is good because it decided that killing Jews was good?

It's a bad comparison anyway. Genocide happens all the time, even in religious societies (by the 1939 census, 94% of Germans were Christian, FWIW). You can't compare this with an entire society suddenly deciding that torturing children is morally correct. If I ever heard of such a baby-torturing society existed, I'd immediately assume it was in accordance with their religious belief, rather than just what they all decided was OK, wouldn't you?

[me:]If you think I’m being ridiculous, what do you think is more likely: that a society somewhere will suddenly realize that they feel just fine about torturing babies, or that a society somewhere will get the idea that it’s their god’s will that they torture babies? Human instinct is much more consistent than the will of any gods ever recorded.

[you:]What about all of Pagan societies throughout the ages that sacrificed their children to demons?

You're making my point for me. Paganism is religion. Non-believers would never justify a habit of killing their own children.

The fact is, in a meaningless Universe you simply can't prove anything without God. You actually have no basis for logic, rationality, morality, uniformity in nature, but you live as if you do. If I ask you how you know your reasoning is valid, you will reply "by using my reasoning".

You're slipping back into solipsism. We agreed not to go there. I'm not going to answer any of those things.

Who said I was an adult? That's part of the fucking problem. This isn't about winning or being right.You're fighting an argument I haven't made.>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Trancecoach:
you're so right. I know nothing about being inspired by the mysteries of the universe, or becoming so enthralled that I pursued a masters and a doctorate, not in an effort to get answers, but to ask wiser questions... And I know nothing about the federal government slashing the funding of crucial social programs that have measurable and direct impact on people's lives -- like whether or not they have enough money to eat, or whether or not their child gets the medical attention they need...
And, surely, I've never thought at all about the hundreds of thousands of orbital debris objects from NASA's abandoned or lost equipment or spaceships that are orbiting earth or items as large as 10kg re-entering the atmosphere to fall god-knows-where (to say nothing of all the hardware that was left on the moon).
There's certainly nothing I can say about the ongoing "civil wars" in which our planet is continuously engaged, be it on the basis of race, status, gender, wealth, resources, or just some petty bullshit argument on a website! No, I'm certainly nowhere near smart enough to understand deGrasse-Tyson, or your scintillating brilliance that you demonstrate in your stunning ability to recognize irony versus sarcasm, and knowing just when to let it go.

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^Trancecoach:
ad hominem will get you everywhere... while I play the tiniest violin for you and Dr. deGrasse-Tyson...

Dude you didn't WIN anything here stop trying to take the high road, you're not smart enough to understand what in the hell he's even talking about.


Yeah don't be an adult, just make shit up so you can win an argument. Do us all a favor and stop trying to be a cynical bastard, you're bad at it.

>> ^Trancecoach:

you're so right. I know nothing about being inspired by the mysteries of the universe, or becoming so enthralled that I pursued a masters and a doctorate, not in an effort to get answers, but to ask wiser questions... And I know nothing about the federal government slashing the funding of crucial social programs that have measurable and direct impact on people's lives -- like whether or not they have enough money to eat, or whether or not their child gets the medical attention they need...
And, surely, I've never thought at all about the hundreds of thousands of orbital debris objects from NASA's abandoned or lost equipment or spaceships that are orbiting earth or items as large as 10kg re-entering the atmosphere to fall god-knows-where (to say nothing of all the hardware that was left on the moon).
There's certainly nothing I can say about the ongoing "civil wars" in which our planet is continuously engaged, be it on the basis of race, status, gender, wealth, resources, or just some petty bullshit argument on a website! No, I'm certainly nowhere near smart enough to understand deGrasse-Tyson, or your scintillating brilliance that you demonstrate in your stunning ability to recognize irony versus sarcasm, and knowing just when to let it go.


>> ^Yogi:
>> ^Trancecoach:
ad hominem will get you everywhere... while I play the tiniest violin for you and Dr. deGrasse-Tyson...

Dude you didn't WIN anything here stop trying to take the high road, you're not smart enough to understand what in the hell he's even talking about.



Yeah don't be an adult, just make shit up so you can win an argument. Do us all a favor and stop trying to be a cynical bastard, you're bad at it.

http://blog.norml.org/2012/08/09/scientific-review-there-is-now-clear-evidence-that-cannabinoids-are-useful-for-the-treatment-of-various-medical-condi
tions/

why give these companies money at all if we can grow our own medicine ... oh... i see the problem... for their wallets

land on mars but cant study a local plant on our planet.

Evolution is obviously the answer, but it's not necessarily the full answer. I could easily see our planet as having been seeded from some place else, but I just don't know and I'm not sure that we can ever really find out.

The third response is valid in both number 2 and 4 as well, so it's a weird mixup in that the third actually is the "safe" response, since that's immediately provable.

>> ^vaire2ube:

k thats it i cant take our planet anymore / suicide
you know what, all food is just molecules in a different form. one step closer to the jetsons pill into meal, just need to seal it all up in one container and have the microwave handle the mixing, like a bread maker.
shit son.


Personally I'm waiting for the 5th Element cubes you put in the cooking machine for 2 seconds and get a big chicken meal out of it, complete with vegetables.

k thats it i cant take our planet anymore / suicide

you know what, all food is just molecules in a different form. one step closer to the jetsons pill into meal, just need to seal it all up in one container and have the microwave handle the mixing, like a bread maker.

shit son.

>> ^critical_d:

Odd how the scientific community seems to have more enthusiasm for exploring the oceans of Titan than our own. I read somewhere that the technological aspects of a dive like Cameron performed are as complex as a moon landing. I guess the thinking was that if something went wrong seven miles below then you are just as screwed as if you were in the Frau Mora Highlands. If the ultimate goal is to setup a colony on Mars or our own Moon, then we should practice in our own backyard first.


Firstly you make the mistake of assuming that all scientists COULD be working on deep sea exploration. There wasn't a scientist working on it but then a bloke pulled him away and asked him to do space instead. Not all of them enjoy marine biology, not all of them work in the correct or an analogous field.

Secondly, there is always the argument AGAINST directed research. That is, most of our most amazing discoveries happened through studying something else and often enough by accident, so why would directed research be any better? The cosmic background radiation was discovered at bell laboratories and they thought it was due to pigeon shit at first. You may as well go back in time and tell einstein to stop pissing about with light and help solve real world problems like in-car navigation. Then suddenly 50 years down the line we have no state of the art GPS system because he didn't go into relativity.

Thirdly, exploring deep sea trenches is, i believe, an engineering problem rather than a theoretical problem. Why would a scientist need to stop working on discovering things to help to either build or generate money for something?

Fouthly, if you think there's interesting stuff in the tiny amount of water that exists on our planet, you should read up on space.

Finally, at least some of the software tools developed by computational astrophysicists have been used to solve earth-bound problems such as climate change and weather systems, so if you study something else you may end up killing two birds with one stone.

Why the hell would anyone rather look at the ocean which is right next to us over the deepest reaches of space anyway? But if we find the key to faster than light travel down there, i'll be looking sheepish

I think building a scientific literate populace would lead to us fixing our planets problems that we created. It is the lack of understanding even basic scientific concepts that leads the populace and our politicians to refuse to accept climate change is in large part man made.

i was just thinking that flare looked like the sun farted. Actually I was thinking just how pathetic religions' descriptions of the universe are in comparison to the actual reality of the universe. The sun farts an enormous spray of plasma, MANY times the size of our planet, and it was just another day. And this is just our solar system.

@bcglorf, I've skimmed through this conversation, and I think that this is the most succinct expression of your position on global warming:
>> ^bcglorf:

Rapidly cutting CO2 emissions before we have the replacement technology in place would be costly, not just financially but world history shows big financial impacts generally spill over into violent impacts. Battery technology is getting very close to making electric cars that are superior in every way to their gas guzzling brethren. I truly do believe that the enormous CO2 contribution made by burning gasoline is rapidly on it's way out for purely economic rather than environmental reasons. Another reason I don't feel the need for panic.
As I stated above, I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O dominates the greenhouse effect. It is the uncontested scientific fact.
I am NOT being a skeptic in declaring that H2O's role in climate models and forcing/feedbacks is very poorly understood. It is an uncontested scientific fact, some models even disagree on whether to assign it as a positive or negative feedback.
Think about those two for a good long while before thinking everything Al Gore said should trump peer reviewed science.


I think John Cole still has the perfect description of the conservative/denier shtick on global warming:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

Now, to your credit, you have executed this script in a more thoughtful, reasoned, honestly skeptical way than most do, but ultimately you're following it to a tee. Hell, you even made a swipe at Al Gore along the way.

I think this comment of criticalthud's is pretty much speaking to why I posted the video in the first place:
>> ^criticalthud:

and I would add:
we have a psychological issue at hand.
the human species thinks it's entitled, and it's OUR planet. We think we're special.
This kind of psychological issue hides reality from us.
We have shown ourselves to be very poor stewards of the planet. How many species have we wiped out? How else have we affected our environment? What sort of poisons have we created, what scale of trash heap? Mindlessly fattening ourselves.
This makes me think it is quite likely that we are the frogs in the slowly boiling water.
So, we can argue about this and that, and whether our governments should act. But in actuality, it is up to each and every one of us to stop being energy and consumer gluttons, feasting during the oil orgy.


Human psychology isn't wired properly for dealing with things like climate change. We have trouble with making connections between our actions in the here and now, and consequences to people elsewhere in space, and in time. We're also weird about our assessment of risk. Some people are deathly afraid of flying, but have no problem driving around in a car, even though driving a car is vastly more likely to result in your death than flying on a plane.

The science isn't certain on exactly what's happening, but then science isn't certain about anything. Everything has a fucking error bar on it. We won't be certain it's gonna kill the human race until the human race dies. We won't know it's not going to be a big problem until it's already stopped...and it's showing no signs of stopping on its own.

Environmentalism at its most basic level is about trying to lessen the impact humanity is having on the natural systems we rely on for the basic necessities of life. It's about not felling forests, not poisoning our water, not blighting our soil, and in this case, it's about trying to get people to stop giving a big fucking shove to the equilibrium of our atmosphere when we don't know exactly how it works (and what we do know suggests doing that could possibly be very bad for us).

The basic disagreement here is about what our default position should be in the absence of certainty. Mine is that we should be humble, and curtail our CO2 emissions rather severely. Yours seems to be that as long as the science isn't yet 100% definite, we should just ignore the problem and just wait until scarcity of coal and oil pushes us off them.

>> ^Peroxide:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^Peroxide:
@bcglorf Your argument is the same tired old bullshit. It isn't us, don't feel guilty, and SWEET JESUS don't do anything to stop the industrial engine of economic growth that is spewing the CO2 in the first place.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-ev
idence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-rev
iew-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html

Actually, I strongly encourage that we stop burning coal and oil, which would virtually eliminate our CO2 emissions. I am a big proponent of pushing battery research the 10% further it needs to go to replace gas powered cars with electric. I am a big proponent of replacing dirty coal and oil based power plants with clean running brand new nuclear plants. If the future pans out as I hope, the next 20 years will see a dramatic drop in our CO2 emissions.
I do NOT argue for that because the sky is falling and we're all gonna die if we don't. I advocate for it because it would reduce really bad pollutants AND save us a fortune very quickly.
If you feel the need to throw out a few web links instead of addressing my statements of facts, backed by peer reviewed science I think you've forfeited the intellectual and scientific high ground.

You are such a troll! OMG! The links I previously provided reference many more peer reviewed studies than your single study, even though you deleted them from your quote of me, (wonder why...) Here they are again, scroll to the bottom of the second link,
AND TAKE NOTE THAT THE LAST TWO PEER REVIEWED PAPERS ARE MORE RECENT THAN THE PAPER YOU CITE !!!
"Huber and Knutti 2011 (HR11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange)."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-rev
iew-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-ev
idence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm
BUT most importantly, you employ circular logic in your main argument, my Chem prof. explained:
You argue water vapour is the cause of current warming, so according to your theory,
-there is more water in the atmosphere making it hotter
-why is there more water in the atmosphere?
-because it is hotter.
-why is it hotter?
-uh... because there is more water in the atmosphere? wait a second...
That's called circular reasoning, and your whole argument hinges on it, scientists have considered these potential forcing agents and CO2 is the primary one, it IS humankind's fault, we CAN abate emissions, and people like you are the reason climate change will reach dangerous levels!
I sympathize for you if your guilt complex is too powerful for you to admit that the warming climate's root cause is anthropogenic. I beg you, please stop misleading others, I don't care if you're employed by exxon or a coal power plant, it MY GOD DAMN ATMOSPHERE TOO!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
I hope wikipedia isn't too liberal a source for your liking, wouldn't be surprised if it is though.


Go back and read my arguments again, you claim that I "argue water vapour is the cause of current warming". I never said that. I talked about the percentage of our planet's greenhouse effect that is attributed to 2 gases, CO2 and H2O.

The greenhouse effect is not 'warming' it is not 'cooling', it is just the ability of various gases in the atmosphere to absorb energy and has been happening for millenia and barring absolute catastrophic disaster will continue to do so for millenia. Among the greenhouse gases climatologists estimate 70% of energy absorbed is done by H2O and 30% by CO2.

I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood even the most basic parts of what I've said. Go back and look closer, or if your not comfortable, get your chem prof to look and get him to explain it. My statements are in keeping with established science, most of it comes directly from articles like those in the links you yourself provided, like Mann et al's team(the hockey stick guys).

and I would add:
we have a psychological issue at hand.
the human species thinks it's entitled, and it's OUR planet. We think we're special.

This kind of psychological issue hides reality from us.

We have shown ourselves to be very poor stewards of the planet. How many species have we wiped out? How else have we affected our environment? What sort of poisons have we created, what scale of trash heap? Mindlessly fattening ourselves.

This makes me think it is quite likely that we are the frogs in the slowly boiling water.

So, we can argue about this and that, and whether our governments should act. But in actuality, it is up to each and every one of us to stop being energy and consumer gluttons, feasting during the oil orgy.