Archived Discussion Main / TheFundamentalist

Dammerung To make things easier, I erased most of the page.

It should be stupidly obvious that atheists can be fundamentalist. Anyone can be a fundamentalist about anything. Religion, cars, the best fucking position while having sex. If you say, "I'm right, no evidence will convince me of otherwise, and I make a positive and absolute claim (and untestable) claim of X" then you're a fundamentalist. Is that simple enough? Why would you think atheists would be the one category of people who couldn't be fundamentalist?

The Question: You removed what Matthew said. He made good points. I am certain those two things are unrelated.

I don't actually recall saying that they were the "one" category that couldn't be. But the reason they can't be is that the category is there is nothing to be "fundamentalist" about. There is no ideology attached to atheism (and that includes your claim about reductionism being some sort of tenant of atheism, which you also removed along with my refutation of it), which seems to be the sticking point that you have. It makes me question whether you understand what atheism means or if your idea of it is only a caricature.

Now, you could almost have a point if we were talking about secular humanism or antitheism (which, strangely, you seem to find abhorrent, if your choice of Hitchens quote is any indication), but you weren't, you were talking about atheism, which makes your statements incorrect.

Unknown Troper: Anyone notice how the people who seem to have the most issues with this page are atheists? This page periodically gets swept of any examples of atheist fundies, and recently a gaggle of them have descended upon the page removing what they claim is "anti-atheist rhetoric" against "outspoken atheists." Examples like these are getting periodicially removed with those claims:

* Brian Flemming, the producer of a "documentary" whose stated facts are either outright wrong, or misrepresented to fit his agenda. He's also got a "Rational Response Squad" that aggressively publicizes the film through harassment of churches and their communities, as well as similar You Tube "campaigns."

* The RRS's attempts to get religious beliefs classified as a mental disorder crossed the Moral Event Horizon for internet celebrities for this troper.

* Christopher Hitchens is another atheist fundie who is frequently cited as a member of the same general movement as Dawkins. He can also be pretty selective and contortionist with their rhetoric. He is on record as saying: "I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful."

** For those who don't understand what's so bad about this, he's saying "Belief in God and religion itself are sources of evil."

* Sam Harris is also a part of the same "New Atheist" movement as Dawkins. Like Hitchens and Dawkins, he does his own quote-mining and distortion of facts. More worrisome, however, is his Knight Templar tendencies with regards to Middle East policy, particularly in terms of nuclear first-strike.

* Fundies Say the Darndest Things: FSTDT is a website that archives ridiculous things such people say; most are of the Christian flavour, but Muslims, Jews and atheists also appear. A great many of them fail biology, logic, and other scientific disciplines forever, as well as theology and the English language.

** The sad thing is that the people snarking at the fundies are just as bad as those quoted—many comments seem to come from fundies of a different flag. For example, in one entry involving a Christian fundamentalist, one person commented with "Christanity is crock shit."

*** Then there was a comment on a ten-year-old's belief of the rapture and the Left Behind books - "I agree with Dawkins that religion = child abuse". Yes, every Christian grew up psychopathic.

* There's an Atheist version of Dinesh d'Soza on You Tube: The Amazing Atheist. Among his many Wall Banger-riffic claims, he's claimed that even if a religious person is converted to atheism, they will never be as intelligent as a natural-born atheist. If you think that atheists are immune to fundamentalism, watch his videos—then see the amount of subscribers he has. It's depressing.

Can someone tell me how noting an atheist who wants religion classified as a mental disorder, or wants a nuclear first strike on the Middle East to help purge the world of religion is anti-atheist rhetoric? Heck, the atheist tropers sweeping this page also remove examples from anyone who claimed Belief Makes You Stupid, whether they were atheist or not:

* Although Bill Maher has declared himself an agnostic, he's shared the Rational Response Squad's opinion that "religion is a mental disorder" for a long time. Now he's made his own documentary, Religulous, involving many of the same tactics Brian Flemming used to "prove" his point—but the film is Actually Pretty Funny despite Maher's relentless bashing of religion. (On the other hand, he does drop the humor and go into an Author Filibuster about the evils of religion towards the end, demanding that believers "grow up or die.")

** Multiple reviewers—even those that liked the film—have commented on Maher's unfairness in his "documentary" as well as his Michael Moore-style tactics. This article about Francis Collins' segment in Religulous is especially telling.

*** Seed Magazine ran another article showing how Bill Maher took seconds-long soundbytes out of hours-long interviews with two other scientists to pervert their positions on religion and science—making it appear they supported Bill Maher's message, when they had been arguing against it in the interview.

Can someone explain to me why all these examples, which would clearly be seen as fundie behavior if they came from the mouths of Phelps, Robertson, or Falwell, is so stubbornly resisted? I swear, the atheists repeatedly removing these examples make the Church of Happyology look downright mild and tolerant in comparison!

The Question: I can explain it to you. It's because religions and the other academic versions are ideologies. Atheism isn't. It's simply an inaccurate use of the term to refer to atheists as fundamentalists. If you are really so bent on putting people who make criticisms of religion on the page, an appropriate name for them would be "secular humanists", as that is actually an ideology. As it is, the thread is simply an outlet to bash those who are critical of religion. Don't get me wrong, Brian Flemming is a moron and Bill Mahrer is pretty unlikable, but acting as though they represent atheism in any way is incorrect.

The asymmetry should be obvious, if all it took a member of a religion to get on this page was to criticize atheism, then the page would take a lifetime to scroll through. But any criticism of religion at all and a person is a "fundamentalist"? Please, don't act as there isn't anti-athiestic bias at work.

Dammerung It is goddamn curious that all this started this morning eh? A bunch of s/ns and I Ps too - maybe some Atheist (Most Definitely Not Fundamentalist) IRC channel caught wind or something.

Now as for you, The Question, I'll create a fundamentalist atheist for you right now. His initials will be QH, which have no particular import.

QH: "There is most definitely not a God, I am absolutely certain of this, and you are a fool and an immoral person for believing there is." Ta-da!

Criticizing religion does not make you a fundamentalist. There is no anti-atheist conspiracy out to persecute you. Jesus fuck crimeny. But yes, it is POSSIBLE to be a fundamentalist atheist as demonstrated above. There ARE people who hold that position, or have quotes that seem to indicate they do. If you are still having trouble with the concept the only thing capable of penetrating your thick skull would be a bunker buster.

I'm against antitheism because it necessitates a very childish view of religion. If you've never read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, you don't have a fucking chance of understanding why people still believe in God and will continue to believe in God for as long as there are human beings. I'm starting to suspect, especially given your condescending attitude and accusations, that you're 5 years too early to be having this conversation with me.

The Question: It is interesting how the civility in the conversation disappeared with the last post. You have done absolutely nothing to address my point. As for your view of anti-theism as childish, it loses a bit of steam when you read your comments towards me. I have made no such insults to you, and yet you feel the need to insult me. I'm not claiming to be a victim, because I am not, so claims of a "persecution complex" are unwarranted. I will say however that your point would be made far better if you attempted to support your assertions with reasoning instead of insults and the word fuck.

And by the way, with the exception of Brian Flemming, your "fundamental atheist" doesn't square up with any of the people mentioned. So thank you for proving my point for me.

Unknown Troper: So wait, you think wanting to nuke a religion out of existence is not a sign of fundamentalism? Because that's what Sam Harris' example is all about. Heck, Bill Maher isn't even an atheist—he's an agnostic—and his own example demonstrates just how much he's like Brian Flemming, but you guys keep removing his example along with anything else that so much as has a hint of atheism in it. You don't consider any of them fundamentalists, eh?

The Question: No, because there are no "fundamental principles" for an atheist to advocate. Just as having a section about "fundamental theists" would be wrong, it is wrong to have one about "fundamentalist" atheists.

And no, I don't consider them "fundamentalists", their views are stupid and wrong in one respect or another, but they don't derive them from any atheist doctrine (there are none) so the term is inapplicable. I understand that you are angry about this, but it is misplaced. No one is claiming an anti-atheist conspiracy, just that the rhetoric being used is anti-atheist and presents atheism as an ideology, which it isn't.

Unknown Troper: Objection—someone is claiming it—as well as many of the same claims you're making.

reason: removed anti-atheist rhetoric

13/Aug/09 at 08:07 PM by 66.67.25.206

reason: removed anti atheist rhetoric

13/Aug/09 at 07:48 PM by 66.67.25.206

reason: addressing misapplication of the "fundamentalist" label to atheists, who do not have beliefs to be fundamentalist about

12/Aug/09 at 07:12 PM by 66.67.25.206

reason: countering ridiculous "atheist fundamentalist" remark

12/Aug/09 at 07:09 PM by 66.67.25.206

reason: removed christian bias against outspoken atheists

12/Aug/09 at 07:01 PM by 66.67.25.206

And multiple other removals with no reason given.

Considering that you, Matthew The Raven, and this other unknown troper have been hitting the page all at the same time, I highly suspect that you are from the same group, like Dammerung suggested.

The Question: Those statements don't make any claim of a "conspiracy" which were the words you used. So you are incorrect. Were you planning on addressing the rest of what I said?

And your suspicion is incorrect. Feel free to call me a liar, but I assure you that PZ didn't send me. ;)

Dammerung By your definition Christians cannot be Fundamentalists because there is no single doctrinal point on which Christians agree. (Do you know this?) If we say, "you must cling to this specific set of principles as part of a collective which does" then there is no collective anywhere which clings to anything as a unified whole. You can't get two Christians together and get fewer than three opinions on a point of doctrine.

I am not responsible for all of the examples on this entry. I don't know which if any I added to be honest.

Since you are either unwilling or incapable of understanding my clearly spelled out example of what a fundamentalist atheist would be, let me suggest to you a more productive use of your time than continuing this argument. You are very obviously not knowledgable about the subject in question. You should pick up and read the following books

• The Golden Bough by James Frazier
• The Antichrist by Nietzsche
• The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
• The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
• The Future of an Illusion by Sigmound Freud
• The Book of the Damned by Charles Forte
• The Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu.
• The Apocryphon of John
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
• The Emerald Tablet of Hermes
• The Kybalion
• Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein

Then, perhaps we could have a meaningful conversation on this topic. But I see it as pointless to continue. Nor should you be allowed to singularly hijack the common opinion to protect your philosophical opinion.

The Question: I am disappointed in you Dammerung, you have completely lost the facade of civility and have degenerated into nothing other than claims of intellectual superiority. For one who claims to be more intelligent than me, you seem not to realize that such attacks are lacking in any sort of persuasive power.

And whether or not the christians in question agree, their holy text does offer material about which to have a fundamentalist interpretation, so I'm afraid your statement fails on its own merits.

The Golden Bough is one of my favorite books by the way. Good suggestion! ;)

Unknown Troper: Wait a second, The Question. These statements you've made:

"No one is claiming an anti-atheist conspiracy."

"Those statements don't make any claim of a "conspiracy" which were the words you used. So you are incorrect."

You're twisting my words. I never said a word about an anti-atheist conspiracy. This is what I said:

"This page periodically gets swept of any examples of atheist fundies, and recently a gaggle of them have descended upon the page removing what they claim is 'anti-atheist rhetoric' against 'outspoken atheists.'"

And, as has been established, there is an unknown troper editing this article who has made these claims.

Matthew The Raven: Huh? Did I just get accused of being part of an atheist conspiracy? No no, I'm part of the International Jewish Conspiracy, and we meet on every third Fridays. The Atheist Baby-Eating Cabal hasn't returned my calls. I will swear to any deity you want that I'm not out to get this page. The Question and I have never interacted at all before or during today, and that third person is just another anonymous contributor. Doesn't even have a name for me to call him by, and I don't deal with Anonymous. Here's what's going on - I posted an objection. That raised this topic to the top of the Recent Changes queue, catching the eye of another troper, who read the article and had an objection. If you'll go back through the page history, I'm not even objecting to the same things - I said that the idea that believing that "there is certainly no God" is Atheist Fundamentalism, but agreed that believing that Belief Makes You Stupid was, while others edited out the whole sentence. There's different shades of belief there. I thoroughly explained this on this very discussion page before my commentary was nuked. But then again, it could be a conspiracy, since we can apparently make words mean whatever we want them to now.

NO REAL LIFE EXAMPLES. How about that?

The Question: Consider the seeming impossibility of coming to a mutual understanding, I second Matthew The Raven's suggestion.

And I apologize if there was a confusion over who said "conspiracy" Unknown, I assure you I was not twisting your words.

So, any chance of that happening?

The Question: If I remove the "Real Life" section will I be yelled at?

Dammerung This edit war is as stupid as the one that resulted when I added Yahweh to Jerkass Gods and then demanded it be kept. it just goes to show - fundamentalism and taking shit ridiculously personally is a universal trait.

Matthew The Raven: Trust me on this one, you just have really ideosyncratic views on religion. You're a gnostic after all. Just because other people don't see things your way doesn't make them fundamentalists. If you want to be the kind of person who makes controversial statements - as you do on your own member's page - don't be upset when people don't agree.

Dammerung I think that my views on religion are idiosyncratic because they come from personal experience, rather than belief. I think that just about anyone who examines the actual content of their experiences carefully is likely to come to similar conclusions. Atheism seems to be about rejecting the content of experiences, at least when it comes in the form of NDE/OOBE/contact dreams/etc.

What I don't like is the censorship implied when a whole swath is erased. Split the entry conceptually instead. If someone writes "Christians are Fundamentalist because they think gays have no place in the church" change it to "Some Christian sects reject the presence homosexuals in their congregations, for instance some hardcore Pentacostals. Others, like Episcopalians or Quakers, have a more tolerant approach." It's erasing the whole thing when there are clear instances of Fundamentalist X that I find frustrating and I see it as kin to intellectual censorship.

Matthew The Raven: What you see as intellectual censorship others would see as nuance and clarification. The first statement, "Christians are Fundamentalists because they think gays have no place in the church" is accurate for certain groups but inaccurate for others - that's why the changed version is superior. This is a wiki, and that's how it works. I'm sorry.

For you, the rejection of your own extrasensory phenomena may appear to be atheism, but many others have never had such experiences, so it's not dishonest for them, and others would chalk it up to aberrant psychological states such as a temporal lobe microseizure. Different strokes.

Dammerung But there was no clarification given, the whole thing was just erased. The Question argued that an atheist could not be fundamentalist according to the case presented on this page.

As for the psychological states issue, that form of reductionism never explained anything. Isolating the part of the brain that perceives vision can't dismiss the content of vision as mere hallucination. Carl Jung makes an excellent case in Dreams,Memories,Reflections that hallucinations aren't epiphenomenea to brain malfunctions but are in fact relevant causes. It's a question of where the horse stands in relation to the cart I suppose. More people have paranormal experiences than think do - but people are very good at not consciously noticing the actual content of their perceptions, and even better at dismissing anything that does not lend itself to immediate explanation.

ilmurov1: What is with you atheists?

Seriously why are you in denial about the fact that atheists, according to this artcile's understanding acan be fundies.

Matthew The Raven: Go back to the history of this discussion and read what I wrote. That will explain it. One of the issues is that the article's bar for an Atheist Fundamentalist is far, far lower than that for a religious person. You will not do this, of course, because you have utter contempt for anyone that disagrees with you, going so far as to insult them on the main trope page.

ilmurov1: No its not. We have Christian fundies who crtisize atheism. If a Christian said that atheism has caused the world nothing but misery and suffering and that all atheists are morons who believe in superstion, that we who have it up here. I think you think the bar is too low because you are an atheist youself. (and BTW all the above discussion is you and The Question arueing that athiests can't be fundies. Also, when do you think that atheists should be put on this page?

Matthew The Raven: I'm Jewish. As I said above. An Atheist should be put on this page when he or she says that Belief Makes You Stupid or something along that lines, and the threat of censure against people who deviate from its world view. Dammerung argued that any atheist who believes that God does not exist with any degree of certainty was automatically a fundamentalist. This is when I started arguing with him, because that's frankly not Fundamentalist behavior. And no, we don't have Christians that Criticize atheism on this page for the act of criticizing atheism - they have to go far beyond the moral pale of normal Christianity to be considered for this page - Jack Chick, Fred Phelps, Dinesh D'Souza, Kent Hovind, and Pat Robertson, all of whom are lunatics who are here for crossing over into outright crazy ideas. However, if we listed every single Christian leader who has denounced other religions or atheism as foolish, dangerous, and destructive we'd have a huge list.

Those are the five Christians and five atheists named on this page (Brian Flemming, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris (he is a dick), Bill Maher)and one Jew, and NO MUSLIMS FOR SOME REASON. I'd only characterize Brian Flemming and Sam Harris as Atheist Fundamentalists, as they fit the dickish denouncement of everyone who doesn't agree with them criteria for this pages' stretched definition of Fundamentalism. The others are just prominent atheists who don't make concessions to religion in their statements. You wouldn't expect someone representing a Christian world view to make the same concessions, so why an atheist?

It's the power of privilege, that's all. You believe that the mainstream point-of-view is to be preserved, and any deviation from that view is anathema, an attack on the system. Only when the mainstream goes to far should it be reined in. That's what I was arguing about above, once I accepted this page's definition of Fundamentalism as an Asshole Ideologue.

ilmurov1: You just don't get it do you. These people go beyond that and say that religion needs to be eradicated. Dawkins was proven to be engaging in quote twistin(lying for a cause is a good indication of fundamentalism). Christopher Hitchens went on record saying that he is anti-theist, which would qualify him as a fundie. Bill Maher is a agnostic and has said "For man to live religion must die" Yeah thats pretty fundie, If there are C Hristians who say that atheism makes you stupid or needs to be eradicated, "put them in the page".

Matthew The Raven: OK, you asked for it.

Dammerung certainly all those examples are both true and representative, but can we limit it maybe to a few examples per religion/philosophy?

Matthew The Raven: No real life examples. That's what I want. The criteria are so loose now that we can add anyone who's ever disagreed with another philosophy/ideology if they do so in a dickish way. And since just about everyone who's really into philosophy on an ideology is usually a bit of a dick, this list will swell unless we put a cap on it. I think the problem is when we substituted the word Fundamentalist for Extremist. That was my original beef with the page. I'm a usage fundamentalist, I guess. I still don't believe that an Atheist can be a Fundamentalist (in the real meaning of the phrase, not the trope meaning). However, I do believe that an Atheist can be an extremist.

Das Auto: OK. The Real Life section is just exploding. I think we need to bring this to the Forums.

Das Auto: Here is the thread.

Unknown Troper: I think this whole outcome is a depressing testament to how manipulative Matthew The Raven is. You all realize that we could have just reverted the additions of Matthew The Raven and ilmurov1 if their "example-stuffing war" was becoming a problem (personally I saw nothing wrong with the examples being added—for either side) ... but instead, we've all given Matthew The Raven exactly what he wanted simply because he couldn't stand the thought of Atheists being listed as fundamentalists.

Matthew The Raven: How many times do I have to explain that I thought the definition was so loose that anybody could just insert anyone that they wanted as long as they disagreed with other positions, thereby robbing the term of any meaning? See my initial arguments over the title - it should be The Extremist or Asshole Ideologue. I've been saying from my initial but civil disagreement with Dammerung that there should be no real life examples because this is just contentious flame bate. And I pointed out how harshly judged atheists were compared to any other ideology. If you look through the discussion history, that's exactly what I said, about five times over. I explained that if you held any other ideology up to the same standard, then just about any religious leader would fit, which is just stupid. When I brought that part up, ilmurov1 threw a fit and said that if I thought it was that way, then I should add examples of Christians.

I said, and I quote, "OK, you asked for it." I'm a firm believer in calling people on their bullshit. It's a moral imperative.

Just to make my point, I took the parameters to their logical (and delightfully stupid!) conclusion. Reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate tactic. On the edit reason when I added those examples, I said something along the lines of "Sorry, you can delete this after this is all over - I'm just doing this to make a point." And when the additions showed the criteria to be absurd Flame Bait, it was deleted.

And if you look through the edit history, you'll find that I removed almost nothing from the atheist side other than Dammerung's assertion that any Atheist who said they were certain there was no God was automatically a Fundamentalist, as such an assertion on the side of any other position would have been shouted down imediately (Note: there was one time that I deleted half of the Real Life Examples SOLELY because they were accidentally duplicated somehow. I didn't remove any content, unless I compressed some natter). However, I still maintain that any atheist who says that Belief Makes You Stupid IS a fundamentalist and I was the one who said that the USSR was an Atheistic regime that persecuted religious people, so clear I do believe that atheists are perfect. And I was going to add a bunch of Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu examples after the Christians just to be fair, but the Real Life Examples were removed. But this is the internet, so any bit of philosophical nuance gets lost in the firefights, especially against ilmurov1.

And I'm not going to childishly accuse you of being stalin/ilmurov1, because you know how to use punctuation.

Unknown Troper: Well, of course I'm not Stalin or ilmurovi. I didn't object to you "making a point" with all your Christian anti-atheist examples being added, now did I? You laid it out yourself, though—you were doing all this in hopes that tropers would delete the entire Real Life examples, and you got exactly what you wanted. Everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that you outright demanded removal of the whole section.

What puzzled me most is, why did you even bother doing that if your ultimate goal was to "call bullshit" on ilmurovi? Was it really necessary to drive an otherwise stable section of the article into oblivion over him? You could have kept your examples to the Discussion page if you were just seeking to put him in his place.

I honestly feel like the article is worse off now than it was before, and that this removal was not necessary. Of course, the discussion to remove the examples altogether occurred without input from anyone who had been directly involved in the whole mess involving you, ilmurovi, The Question or that other unknown troper. And since I'm not known, I suppose my opinions aren't worth much anyway.

Matthew The Raven: And I feel that the article is better off now because the Flame Bait magnet is gone. That is all.

• Jack Chick isn't so much a Christian fundamentalist as he is a fundamentalist fundamentalist, unless it is all an elaborate hoax.
• The infamous Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church has crossed Moral Event Horizons as often as some people cut their hair. Phelps's defining characteristic is a quite rabid hatred of all things homosexual, and he and his ilk regularly picket the funerals of gays, gay supporters, AIDS victims, and soldiers killed in Iraq, claiming that their deaths and other tragedies like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were God punishing America's acceptance of homosexuality. His Catchphrase is "God Hates Fags" (also the address of his website...visit at your own risk). His actions have led to the passing of laws banning protests within the vicinity of funerals in several states.
  • Not only does he target homosexuality and war victims, he somehow ties just about every natural disaster (including earthquakes in China) and publicized death (like the guy in Canada who was run over by a bus) to God hating the various countries. Thus far, this troper believes Phelps has claimed God hates America, Sweden, China, India, France, Mexico, Canada, England, and Australia (after the death of Heath Ledger). He also has claimed that God hates FRED ROGERS for crying out loud!
    • What? WT...? Why isn't Germany on that "God hates you" list? I thought we had a legal right to appear on every List Of Evil (TM) since WWII. Isn't anyone respeciting tradition anymore?
    • What makes you think that he didn't approve of the Holocaust? It was the mass murder of Jews, Romani, largely Catholic and Orthodox Slavs, Communists, cripples (who can't walk because they hate Jesus), "fags"...
  • It should be noted that according to four of Phelps' children who have left his group, Phelps stopped believing in God decades ago, and uses his "God hates" shtick as a way to get under the skin of various groups of people whom he doesn't like. He has also been a faithful campaign organizer/fundraiser for Democrats including Al Gore. This guy defies all stereotypes.
    • Also according to two of his children who left him, Phelps became addicted to amphetamines and barbituates while going through law school, beat his entire family, and dictated who or when the children could marry (a particularly horrifying tale involves Phelps constantly referring to Phelps Jr's girlfriend as a "whore", belittling her until she wound up dying of substance abuse, which he responded to by singing "the whore is dead."). Why can't people like this actually get struck by lightning?
  • He also managed to get ejected from a show by Fox News. Fox News.
    • Just how bad is Phelps? Even the late Jerry Falwell (the same Falwell who believed that 9/11 was direct punishment from God for America's tolerance of gays, feminists, and pagans) thought he went too far.
    • It wasn't just Falwell, either. The entire Right Wing wants nothing to do with him. Even the notoriously conservative Baptist Church cut their ties with him and defrocked him as a pastor, and he has been operating independently for about ten years. What's extremely irritating is that it wasn't until he started protesting the funerals of soldiers that the country realized what GLBT people and their families have had to put up with for years.
    • Dude, The KKK think he's too extreme. Even Evil Has Standards.
  • Ironically, Phelps used to be a lawyer who voluntarily defended African Americans in the 60s in civil rights cases.
    • Only for the good publicity. He made fun of his clients behind their backs (and often to their faces).
• Only slightly less noxious than Fred Phelps and Jack Chick is Kent Hovind, a child-abusing, pathologically-lying, tax-cheating Creationist con artist who insists that Dinosaurs Are Dragons, and is perhaps best known as the subject of Buddhikka's document "300 Creationist Lies". Hovind "offered" to pay $250,000 to anyone who could prove the Theory of Evolution, but needless to say, he never had the least intention of honestly evaluating the mountains of evidence that have been presented against him, let alone paying up, yet he continues to insist no one has proven him wrong. Hovind is such an arrogant jackass that even other Creationist sites refuse to back him up. Luckily, he's currently rotting away in prison for dozens of counts of fraud. (Welcome news to anyone who has ever wanted to remark "Wow, the system does work.")
• If you listened to Pat Robertson back in the 70s, you might have believed the world would come to an end back in 1982. It didn't . More recent viewers would be aware of the Tsunami that would wash the sinful NW Coast clean in 2006, or the massive terrorist attack on the United States in 2007. In addition, Scotland is "a dark land" overrun by homosexuals.
  • And, apparently, he thinks (or used to) that "feminism" consists of women becoming lesbians and practicing witchcraft. Somehow, Simone de Beauvoir sounds a lot cooler.
• This goes all the way back to 2 John in the New Testament, in which Second Book of John states that anyone who disbelieves in Christ is a liar and an antichrist, and Corinthians states that a Christian should not mix with unbelievers, who are inherently dark:

  "For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist." (2 John 1:7)

  "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" (2 Corinthians 6:14)

• And going back even further, we have the commonly cited Psalm 14, which states that 'The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."'
• Jewish-American Constitutional scholar Debbie Schlusse was quoted as saying, "Listen, we are a Christian nation. I'm not a Christian. I'm Jewish, but I recognize we're a Christian country and freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion." She also stated during the same three panel interview on Paula Zahn Now that atheists are weak and led to the rise of Islam in Europe. This panel consisted of Schlusse and two Christians, without an atheist to represent atheism.
• "The Boy Scouts of America maintain that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing his obligation to God."
• Joyce Meyer, the president of Joyce Meyer Ministries stated that the very idea of Seperation of Church and state is "a deception from Satan" during the Christian Coalition's 2002 Rally for Solidariy with Israel. She is also a "Christian Zionist," a rather terrifying group of Fundamentalists.
• Daniel P Moloney, the Associate Editor of First Things - the Journal of Religion and Public Life is quoted as saying that "Morality as we know it cannot be maintained without Judeo-Christian religion."
• Henry Morris, Young-Earth Creationist, literally believed that the theory of "Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice."
• Ronald Reagan, rather frighteningly, believed that the Battle of Armageddon could occur in his life time, and that "politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related." (said at a Dallas prayer breakfast on August 23, 1984).
• Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, has threatened abortion providers with violence, going so far to say that "When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."
• Roman Catholic Priest David Trosch states that "Sodomy is a graver sin than murder... Unless there is life there can be no murder." in his article, "Failed Sodomy / Homosexual Acts: Abortion Commonly Follows Practical Sodomy."
• Advice columnist Christy Shipe has written in her column that Christians should not associate with non-believers:

  God does not want us to be corrupted by close relationships with unbelievers. The fact is, if someone is not for God then they are against Him. You cannot be neutral with God. You're either on His side or on the side of the enemy.

• Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, used his bizarre Theosophical philosophy to justify his racism and his rejection of modern, "Agnostic" science.
• Johnathan Swift, in his Thoughts on Religions stated that "The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome."
• Then Vice-President George Bush answered Robert Sherman in 1987 with "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." His son made equally inflamatory remarks against Wiccans and characterized his military campaigns as "crusades."
• Senator Robert Byrd stated that Atheism was eroding American values.

  Can it be that we, too, are ready to embrace the foul concepts of atheism? Somebody is tampering with America's soul, I leave it to you who that somebody is.

• In an editorial in the April 1948 journal of the Italian Jesuit journal Civiltá Caustics, Albert J. Menendez and Edd Doerr wrote:

  In a state where the majority of people are Catholic, the church will require that legal existence be denied to error, and that if religious minorities exist, they shall have only a de facto existence without opportunity to spread their unbeliefs.

• Ann Coulter's Godless and her frequent denigration of Muslims pretty much pigeonholes her into this category.
• * Democratic Representative Monique Davis, famous for her anti-Atheist tirade before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springifeld, Illinois, denouncing atheist Robert Sherman with:

  What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous ... it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God! Get out of that seat ... You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

• Atheism has its own fundamentalists
  • The Brights movement, is made of anti-religious atheists.
  • Karl Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses."
  • The documentary, root of all evil insists that religion must be destroyed.
  • Mark Twain called religion, Believing something you know ain't there.
  • The book Why I am not a Christian insists that Christianity is evil and nobody in there right mind should be one.
  • Polly Toynbee has recevied an award for the most Islamophobic media personality.
  • The dictator of Albania Enver Hoxha banned religion in that country.
  • Mao tse tung was an atheist who outlawed religion and destroyed centuries of irreplaceable artifacts and art simply because they were in temples, during the cultural revolution
  • Philosopher Betrand Russel has claimed that all religion is based on fear and nothing else.
  • Rational Response Squad is a group of atheists that harass religious people.
  • The book God is not great insists that religious people are incapable of leaving Hitchens alone, also that all there worlds problems are dut to religion.
  • The end of faith states that again all evil is religion's fault, none of it has to with politics or anything else just religion
  • The God delusion insists that all religious people are in denial about evolution, and that being religious leads you to to hate gays and be pro life.
  • Stalin was an atheist and killed thousands of priests just for being preists.
  • On the same note the Society of [[the militantly godless http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Godless]], was formed to try to wipe out religion.
  • Daniel Denett is part of the Brights movement which is anti-religious.
  • PZ Meyers, has runs an anti-religious blog called Pharyngula.
  • Brian Flemming, the producer of a "documentary" whose stated facts are either outright wrong, or misrepresented to fit his agenda. He's also got a "Rational Response Squad" that aggressively publicizes the film through harassment of churches and their communities, as well as similar You Tube "campaigns."
    • The RRS's attempts to get religious beliefs classified as a mental disorder crossed the Moral Event Horizon for internet celebrities for this troper.
    • Ads for his "documentary" show up in Google Ad Sense if there's even a hint of the page mentioning God, Jesus, or religion. Happens a lot here on TV Tropes. Really irritating, this.
  • Richard Dawkins qualifies as a Fundamentalist to some people, but there's others who say differently. Everyone has a different opinion about this guy, and none of them get along.
    • Dawkins has been accused (and proven on several occasions) of practising "quote-mining", the practice of taking certain quotes out of context to support one's argument. A really nasty example is the John Adams quote used in The God Delusion.
    • Quote-mining seems to be a common practice among fundamentalists of any type; Christian fundies use a longer extract as evidence that he was Christian. (Adams was really a Deist.) A full copy of Adam's letter, and its reply from Jefferson is just a discussion between the two of them about the separation of church and state. So Yeah.
  • Christopher Hitchens is another atheist fundie who is frequently cited as a member of the same general movement as Dawkins. He can also be pretty selective and contortionist with their rhetoric. He is on record as saying: "I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful."
    • For those who don't understand what's so bad about this, he's saying "Belief in God and religion itself are bad and wrong, with no positive effects whatsoever."
  • Sam Harris is also a part of the same "New Atheist" movement as Dawkins. Like Hitchens and Dawkins, he does his own quote-mining and distortion of facts. More worrisome, however, is his Knight Templar tendencies with regards to Middle East policy, particularly in terms of nuclear first-strike.
    • Harris is so fundamentalist that he doesn't want Francis Collins in the NIH just because he's a Christian. Collins worked on the Human Genome Project as its director, and is also a renowned biologist. If anything, he is overqualified.
    • Proof that atheists can advocate religious persecution. (Anyone remember the Soviet Union, Khmer Rogue, or Enver Hoxha?)
• Although Bill Maher has declared himself an agnostic, he's shared the Rational Response Squad's opinion that "religion is a mental disorder" for a long time. Now he's made his own documentary, Religulous, involving many of the same tactics Brian Flemming used to "prove" his point—but the film is Actually Pretty Funny despite Maher's relentless bashing of religion. (On the other hand, he does drop the humor and go into an Author Filibuster about the evils of religion towards the end, demanding that believers "grow up or die.")
  • Multiple reviewers—even those that liked the film—have commented on Maher's unfairness in his "documentary" as well as his Michael Moore-style tactics. This article about Francis Collins' segment in Religulous is especially telling.
    • Seed Magazine ran another article showing how Bill Maher took seconds-long soundbytes out of hours-long interviews with two other scientists to pervert their positions on religion and science—making it appear they supported Bill Maher's message, when they had been arguing against it in the interview.
• Fundies Say the Darndest Things: FSTDT is a website that archives ridiculous things such people say; most are of the Christian flavour, but Muslims, Jews and atheists also appear. A great many of them fail biology, logic, and other scientific disciplines forever, as well as theology and the English language.
  • The sad thing is that the people snarking at the fundies are just as bad as those quoted—many comments seem to come from fundies of a different flag. For example, in one entry involving a Christian fundamentalist, one person commented with "Christanity is crock shit."
    • Then there was a comment on a ten-year-old's belief of the rapture and the Left Behind books - "I agree with Dawkins that religion = child abuse". Yes, every Christian grew up psychopathic.
    • What makes it funnier is what Dawkins actually said was indoctrination = child abuse, not religion.
• Conservative journalist Dinesh d'Soza, who wrote a book saying that the September 11th terrorist attacks happened because Muslims hated secular liberalism and cited the fact that Richard Dawkins wasn't invited to speak at Virginia Tech after the Cho Seung-Hui shooting as proof that Christianity is superior to atheism.
  • There's an Atheist version of Dinesh d'Soza on You Tube: The Amazing Atheist. Among his many Wall Banger-riffic claims, he's claimed that even if a religious person is converted to atheism, they will never be as intelligent as a natural-born atheist. If you think that atheists are immune to fundamentalism, watch his videos—then see the amount of subscribers he has. It's depressing.
• The various cults scattered across western North America collectively known as the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints believe in the strictest possible interpretation of early Mormonism and are pretty much single-handedly responsible for mainline Mormons' undue reputation as polygamists. (The orthodox Church of Latter-Day Saints actually outlawed polygamy in the 1800's.)
• Jesus Camp. Dear Lord, Jesus Camp.
• Right-wing journalist Melanie Phillips often comes across in her columns as a Jewish fundamentalist. According to her, footage of Palestinian casualties is generally fake and in her mind, it seems that anyone who does not demonstrate absolute support for Israel is a closet Nazi. This belief extends to the point where she referred to the Independent Jewish Voices group (more liberal Jews who express reservations about some Israeli policy) as, "Jews for genocide." Jonathan Freedland, a prominent Jewish journalist, probably put it best:

  "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV... But even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide — literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people... it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning."

Dammerung: have a look - any claim about the afterlife or God is unscientific. There is no way to posit a testable hypothesis about this matter. The moment you say "There is no God" you have left science and you are sailing the merry seas of metaphysics.

Majin Gojira: Atheism is religious in the same way that health is a disease, or what sort of hair color baldness is. . Most Atheists (Emperical Rationalists, Secular Humanists and many other harder philosophies in particular, which I will lump under Atheism for convinence, though there are other Atheistic philosophies which differ slightly or say little in regard to this segment of the "Belief" such as Communism, Existentialism and Absurdism) don't even consider an afterlife as a possibility because it relies on metaphysics and atheists do not include that in their worldview. Therefore, they use the tried and true methodologies prodived for analysis that have proven useful in other areas (IE: Science and Rational Thought).

Skeptics deny the supernatural as a whole becuase it is literally what it says: "Supernatural" IE: Beyond the natural order. If it is beyond the natural order it is ergo not appart of the Universe and therefore not within consideration anymore than Naruto is. The Afterlife is, to Atheists, like Naruto is to most: Fictional and therefore nonexistant in reality beyond a series of published works. The Afterlife is just another Ubsubstanciated Claim, along the same lines as Conspiracy Theories, Bigfoot and UF Os. They are unconvinced of the existence of all these phenomenon and therfore do not believe in them. In Jerkass moments, this turns into a hard "No" which is easily construed for a "proclimation of belief" or "Faith" but is not. No more than the Atheist's belief in Gravity is taken on "Faith."

If it requires "Faith" (IE: A professed conviction) then Atheists do not believe it. Since Atheism lacks faith (among other details) it cannot be defined as a religion. Even IF as you state, it requires metaphysics to speculate on the "Unknown" (which Atheism is not doing, it's ignoring it), it still lacks all the key components necessary to be defined as a religion. Unless you want to define "Faith" as "Any Old Thing A Person Happens to Believe In" in a religious context, and thus utterly devalue it and put it on the same stance as personal opinions about movies. Any belief system that is accepted as a Religion (yes, there's a difference) is a doctrine of ritual traditions, cerimonies, mythology and assosiated dogma of Faith-Based belief systems which all include the idea that some measure of "Self" (be it a soul or portion of consciousness, memories, etc) may, in some sense, continue beyond the death of the physical being. Saying that "The Evidence says nothing does" is the very antithesis of religion.

Or you could ignore that and then I'll ask you to argue that being a Liberal is now a religious belief.

Atheism has no Supernatural Explinations, no Doctine, no Dogma, no Fables, no Rituals, no Traditions, no Holidays and no leaders. So how the hell is it a Religion?

Dammerung: Atheism is not a religion but it is a metaphysical, rather than scientific, claim. To say there is no God has no testable basis.

• 1. Atheism has no rational basis. There is no logical proof such that the existence of God is disproved.
  • 1a. Occam's razor is not a testable hypothesis but is instead just a useful intellectual tool. Occam's razor cannot disprove anything.
• 2. Atheism has no scientific basis. God is not a hypothesis that can be disproved.
• 3. Atheism has no empirical basis.
  • 3a. The fact of not seeing something does not mean it does not exist.
  • 3b. A large number of people have claimed to have interacted with non-material beings or have visited a non-material "otherworld." We have no inherent reason to deny the validity of their observations.
  • 3c. A large number of people have had near-death experiences in which they have subjectively experienced death and have had experiences of God, Heaven, Hell, and other assorted supernatural phenomena. There is no inherent reason to deny the validity of their observations.

Since atheism is not a rational, scientific, or empirical claim - it is a metaphysical claim. Atheism is a belief, not a fact. In matters of belief there will always be someone who takes it too far and makes an ass of themselves.

Majin Gojira: Thank you for showing a fundemental failure to understand how Hypotheses work in an emprical context.

Hopefully, you've never bought a rock that keeps away Tigers.

Disproof does not occur in Emperical/Scientific Analysis. You most provide positive proof of a claim as well as address possible alternative explinations before reaching a conclusion. And even if it IS proved beyond a reasonable doubt, it's still not "absolute proof", that only exists in Mathematics.

Though it's good to see that you ken to deem Atheism not being a religion.

Dammerung: the problem with positive proof of a subjective observation is that it can't be done. You can poke peoples' brains but you can't determine the nature or veracity of their experiences. In my opinion, the experience of God, is God. The universe itself is "God's Word"/Logos/Word made flesh and you can't use the contents of that universe, or instrumentation of the universe, to measure something outside of it.

If you have a genuine interest in the subject, I recommend William James' The Variety of Religious Experience and research the "interdimensional" hypothesis on UF Os. I find however that most people are rather like me - simply like to argue.

Majin Gojira: Just so you realize, the entire problem that Atheists/skeptics have with the experiences is that they are Subjective and not Objective.

Though, oddly, I have a yin for that sort of reading, so I will be looking into that.

Dammerung: but there is no objectivity - only a convergence of subjectivity to a greater or lesser extent.

Majin Gojira: That's what the Scientific Method and Empiracism are fore, reducing the subjectivity to as close to non-existence as is reasonable to expect.

Dammerung: See, I think that's a mad idea and somehow manages to combine megalomania with nihilism.

There is no way to observe "objective" reality. It does not exist. It is a metaphysical idea with no basis in scientific fact. It just happens to be a metaphysical idea that carries weight in the scientific community; an implicit assumption that is not questioned and which is used to dismiss all kinds of empirical data that scientists consider fantastical and not worthy of examination.

Majin Gojira: How the hell is the Scientific method "Megalomanical" or "Nihilistic" when all it entails is a method anyslsis. It takes no "position" other than the methodology of analysis. It does not deny positive aspectsw of life, nor does it seek to accumulate anything. It can be used to accumulate knowledge with the intent of overal benifit, but that's it.

And how can Science be a part of Metaphysics when it specifically is meant to transcend physics—which is where Science is rooted. Really, you've just confirmed for me that you do not even understand the position your are taking, let alone the one you are attacking.

If reality is not Objective, then I propose you perform an experiment, this requires a Table, a Hammer and your hand.

• First, Place your hand on the table.
• Second, pick up the hammer in your other hand.
• Third, Smash the hand on the table with the hammer.

If reality is not Objective, then you'll have no problem smashing your hand, since for all you know, this is The Matrix, or the illusion of some Daemon and your hand really isn't there.

If reality is Objective, then you're going to hurt yourself.

Just because a system is complex does not mean we should give up trying to understand it. Think of Reality as a Murder Mystery. What are you going to do, speculate blindly or analyize the evidence available.

Dammerung: Look, there is an implicit claim amongst modern scientists that somewhere behind our subjective experiences is an objective reality. This is a metaphysical claim. This goes straight back to Kant, telling us that we don't perceive things, we perceive our perception of things. There isn't any objective reality hiding behind our perceptions. Our perceptions themselves are the reality which exists. Objectivity is a superstition of witch doctors trying to give their ravings particular legitimacy beyond that of the ordinary ravings of common folk.

If Reality is a murder mystery, it is one where there is no corpse, wherein one witness saw the victim killed by a man in a yellow jacket; the second witness saw the victim killed by a man in a red jacket; and a third witness saw the victim shoot a man in a red jacket, climb out the window, and then rappel down the cliffside into a waiting boat.

Mr Death: Just to chime in here, it sounds like you're saying that because our senses aren't perfect, we should more or less disregard what they have to say about the world.

Isn't that exactly the argument that everyone on this site (myself included) says was the biggest Wall Banger in the Sword Of Truth series (specifically, the civilization shown in Naked Empire, which lived by the motto "Nothing is real")?

Different perspectives and imperfect memories do not in any way mean there's no such thing as objective reality. What is, is. The fact of the matter is, there are solid things, there are events that indisputably happened. Saying that differing perspectives really mean it never actually happened is, well, silly.

As to your example of the murder mystery, any mystery author worth his salt could come up with a way for that to work plausibly in a story. Here, I'll give it a shot:

The first witness is color blind, but too embarrassed to say so. The second witness didn't actually witness the murder itself: He just saw someone with a red jacket standing over the dead man. The third witness is correct; the killer shot the man in the red jacket, then took the jacket because, hey, it's a nifty jacket and you can barely see the blood, and then made his escape. And there's no corpse because the killer took the body, or dumped it in the river when he got on the boat.

Alternately, the first or third man is lying for his own reasons. Or is the killer trying to foul up the investigation.

Majin Gojira: Kant was an idiot. Let's be blunt about this. He relied on Appologetics, which is really little more than hot air. Aristotilian philosophy, on which Kant honestly coppied by and large, is little better. As one commentator in the Enlightenment of England put it (name escapes me), they were "little better than spiders, spinning threads out of their own susbtance. You can reach a conclusion if you play the game of 20 Questions, but not if you play 20 Assumptions—that's just a good way to stay wrong for a very long time.

I'm going to quote an example from Aron Ra's epic ''The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism'' Youtube Series. Particularly the 4th One that Belief = Knowledge, to give you an idea of how critical thinking works, since you seem to have no understanding of what it actually is.

"Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence."

"For example, if I go into my front yard and I see a large sauropod walking down the middle of my street, I will of course be quite convinced of what I see. I may be even more satisfied when I follow the thing and find that I can touch it, maybe even ride it if I want to. When I gather sense enough to run back for my camcorder, I may not be able to find the beast again, because I don't know which way it went. But that doesn’t matter because I saw it, I heard it, felt it, smelt it and I remember all that clearly with a sober and rational mind. But somehow I'm the only one who ever noticed it, and of course no one believes me. Some other guy says he saw a dinosaur too, but his description was completely different, such that we can’t both be talking about the same thing. So it doesn't matter how convinced I am that it really happened. It might not have. When days go by and there are still no tracks, no excrement, no destruction, no sign of the beast at all, no other witnesses who’s testimony lends credence to mine, and no explanation for how a 20-meter long dinosaur could just disappear in the suburbs of a major metropolis, much less how it could have appeared there in the first place, -then it becomes much easier to explain how there could be only two witnesses who can’t agree on what they think they saw, than it is to explain all the impossibilities against that dinosaur ever really being there. Positive claims require positive evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that’s what I’d need –since what I propose isn’t just extraordinary; its impossible. But since there's not one fact I can show that anyone can measure or otherwise confirm, then my perspective is still subjective -and thus uncertain. Eventually, even I, the eyewitness, would have to admit that, although I did see it, I still don’t know if it was ever really there –regardless whether I still believe that it was."

But you'd honestly better stop until you can A) cite a source for the first line claim, B) Perform the hammer experiment.

Otherwise, there's no way in hell that citing Can't is going to convince me, and if you hold to that philosophy so tightly, it is unlikely I'm going to convince you.

But that Hammer is waiting.

Dammerung: The hammer example is pointless. It does not demonstrate anything. You can't get outside of subjective reality to find objective reality. Any experiment that is conducted takes place within subjective reality, or a network of subjective realities. One person seeing something does not make it objectively real, right? Nor then do five people. Or five million. Tens of thousands of people witnessed one miracle (or peculiarity) and it still is dismissed as an illusion.

"Objective" reality is a very Platonic idea - the idea that outside the network of personal experience is a REAL THING, the one and only true and real thing. I reject this idea. Reality is a gradient. Some things are more and less real. A more real thing has a greater presence in the network of subjective experiences. A less real thing might only be seen by one person, but it is not unreal even if it is extraordinary like a ufo abduction or a djinn.

It is the presence of consciousness that hypostatizes a possibility into a reality.

I myself have had a series of bizarre experiences, similar in fact to "The Matrix." This world and the other world both exist, they both project into subjective reality, but they also both operate according to different internal laws with a different kind of consistency. To try to pawn it off as a "dream" or "hallucination" doesn't explain anything. They don't conform to the objective reality of scientia-materialist mythology, so they are rejected out of hand as false data. I believe there isn't any false data. "Reality" is a network derived from the subjective experiences of conscious terminals which extend not just through this world but through the entire universe and also throughout a matrix of probability and imagination.

Majin Gojira: As expected, no citation, continued afirmation of reality being subjective, failure to grasp critical thinking, a slipery slope falacy, a personal affirmation of an event even though I already have written out that witnesses are worthless as evidence to an empericist (IE: the person you are trying to convince), afirmation of belief when I just left a quote stating that belief is pointless when dealing with persons other than yourself, and a rapidity of response that indicates that the quoted source was not even read (I can understand skipping the link, but doing that to a quote is just rude).

Perform the experiment. See if you'll go through with inflicting harm on yourself because after all—It's just "Subjective" reality, right? That's the point of it and you missed it so badly it's almost laughable.

End it now. You don't have a clue about how science actually works if you cling to such flimsy justification. You are not going to change, and your very position prevents you from bringing out the evidence that is required to change my stance.

Dammerung: and thus you are consumed by the same kind of nonsense that consumes Christian fundies. of course a hammer blow in subjective reality would hurt. It would SUBJECTIVELY hurt. It would not objectively hurt - what would such an idea mean, anyway? Pain is something that occurs within consciousness. Pain is not something which occurs within matter, it is a mere configuration of matter and energy. It is the self, the SUBJECT, which considers that configuration painful.

All experiments are performed within a context - the context of the self. Experimental physics does not take place in a Platonic world of forms. It exists within the domain of human experience. You can't get outside yourself. You can't observe the world objectively.

You strike me as a man whose mind obscures his vision. You close your eyes and see "nothing" because that is what you have been trained to believe that you see, when you close your eyes.

Majin Gojira: I know I said I was done, but GOD DAMN! How badly can you miss the point when you accuse me of being a fundementalist when I providie citations for How You Can Change My Opinion and after I link a web series entitled The Foundational Falsehoods Of Creationism!

This is a joke, right?

The point of the experiment is that this so-called "Subjective" reality inforces itself on you whether or not you accepted as such, ergo, it is better to accept it than blindly dismiss it, even though by involving others, it meets the crfiteria you laid out of going outside the "Self" because Kantian metaphysics denies everything BUT the Self as one of its core components that the Hammer experiment shows to be false through the inforcement of this "Subjective Reality".

The Peer Review Process removes the concept of "Self" from the equation, but with the understanding of science you have so far demonstrated, I'd have to explain that to you at length and, as you'v already stated, would not accept that as being unsubjective because you actually believe that "Absolute Truth" exists outside of a mathematical context (if I am undestanding your potion correctly), which is not something that Science proposes.

You clearly have no understanding of Science, skepticism or critical thinking and have gone to the conclusion that it is closed minded—the crowning statement of one who does not even have an incling og what any of those terms actually means. Science Has no "Beliefs" upon which to impose reality. Science is only a way of analyzing the information provided to us—but since that "Information" is, to you, a "Subjective Belief" for ill defined reason (Kant being unable to let go of his Bronze Age Fables), you take THAT as a belief, even though there's nothing else to go with. Kant tried to argue that only the awareness of the self is real and the source of truth, but the minute he claimed to have Truth, he became no different from a huckster or evangelical.

Science does not have the truth, it is a way to attempt to get there—and we likely will never get there in many cases.

Philosophy is interesting, amusing mental exerzise, but in pratical maters it is useless, as history has repeatedly attested.

I have no answer, only questions. So how can I enforce a "Belief" on the world when I'm constatly re-evaluating my position.

I don't think I could have come up with a better example of "Pot calling the Kettle Black" if I tried. After all, you're the one who has demonstratably been repeatedly misinformed about the very nature of science, logic AND critical thinking. Of course, in your worldview, nothing can be demonstrated because it's not really there, and yet you continue to try and convince me of your worldview's accuracy even though your worldview cannot provide the one thing I require for me to accept it as anything other than a Spiders Web: Physicality.

I await evidence, your philosophy simply cannot provide it, so you accuse the person looking for evidence as being closed minded.

Irony. Hurts.

But this is so far off topic that it's downright silly to keep this up here.

Dammerung: ...The Peer Review Process removes the concept of "Self" from the equation

Ho ho! Here we find one of the misguided assumptions here. No, the peer review process instead compounds the problem of "Self" by adding a whole bunch of other selves to an already murky procedure. You are trying to convince me that one person viewing an event is not real, but five hundred people viewing an event makes it real. What kind of metaphysics is this? Reality-by-consensus that makes a simple statement like "I'm cold" into a psychotic delusion held by an insane mind.

..."So how can I enforce a "Belief" on the world when I'm constatly re-evaluating my position."

This is just a thing you know to say, in the same way a Christian knows to say "In the beginning was the Word" without understanding it.

..."Of course, in your worldview, nothing can be demonstrated because it's not really there"

Of course it's really there. It's really subjectively there. What's most relevant and most real, is what is real to the SUBJECT, to the person having the experience. Experiences are the basis of what is real...

..."and yet you continue to try and convince me of your worldview's accuracy even though your worldview"...

and worldviews are what are not real.

The contents of a dream, are far more real than the idea that dreams are not real and have no ontological significance. You are looking to ideas about reality to guide what you think is real and generally disregarding what is actually - subjectively - experienced. The contents of a hypnogogic hallucination are more real than the idea that an event must be demonstrable and repeatable to be real.

Majin Gojira: And you call me a Fundie.

Here we find one of the misguided assumptions here.

Indeed we do, so much so that I (in a sadly lost post) accounted for your very counterargument and you went ahead and effectively parroted it. I forgot to restore that part, and you only have my word on its existence, so for that I do apologize.

What kind of metaphysics is this?

It's not. It's physics. Nothing Meta about it. It's why Science has given you the illusory-to-you machine that you type on.

While Metaphysics has given us nothing but headaches and hot air.

Reality-by-consensus that makes a simple statement like "I'm cold" into a psychotic delusion held by an insane mind.

You Fail Science Forever. Seriously.

This is just a thing you know to say, in the same way a Christian knows to say "In the beginning was the Word" without understanding it.

Okay, prove it. Oh, wait, you can't. Your philosophy forbids evidence from existing, I almost forgot—Or I feigned ignorance to hammer home the point in a mocking manner. Either one is likely, but one is more so given evidence (that you cannot use without invalidating your philosophy).

and worldviews are what are not real.

And here you are, trying to prove the validty of yours and disprove the valdity of mine, when one has given us technological advancement and the other a lot of writing.

You going to say you aren't, but to other observers, you are. Not that it matters to you, because only the thoughts between your ears are real to you.

I've given up trying to convince you of my stance's validity because I acknowledged your worldview and how it taints your perception.

You could say that mine is similarly tainited, but that again shows a failure of understanding of Sketpicism. Unlike you, I've read up on both Science AND Kant.

You are looking to ideas about reality to guide what you think is real and generally disregarding what is actually - subjectively - experienced. The contents of a hypnogogic hallucination are more real than the idea that an event must be demonstrable and repeatable to be real.

Except when that Hammer breaks the bones in your hand.

Do me a favor, before you type ANTYHING Else. Please define Science, Empiricism/Empirical Naturalism, and Scientific Method are—no dictionary cheats, just what you THINK it is at this moment. THEN go to the dictionaries (plural on purpose), Wikipedia and a 1st grade science textbook and compare the answers.

Then post them both…ya know what, not here. This Natter is off topic and cluttering up the page. If you really want to continue trying to ‘persuade’ me of the validity of your…Collegate Major (BS? BA? Doctorate? PHD? WTF?) , Do so in the Forums.

And Remember, Context is very important in terms of definitions.

Dammerung: Except when that Hammer breaks the bones in your hand.

You do not, in fact, have the remotest idea of what I am arguing do you?

Majin Gojira: As I understand it, you're arguing based on the validity of Kantian Metaphysics (or a related metaphysical Philosophical subset, I'm not going to claim that my research is equal to yours and do not know all its various subsets and permutations) at this point, having long since strayed from the original subject mater of the differenciation between Empirical Naturalism subset of Atheism being a "belief system" after going through a time period of trying to define Subjectivity, the Convergence of Subjevity and Objectivity.

I always look forward to clarification, and hope that it is not something this extreme.

It could be that in the third case you're arguing that Objecitivity, like Truth, is something science strives for through the convergence of Subjectivity—and that can be agreeable—but that you use it to dismiss the system for striving instead of being to my understanding of it is something that I find wholy disagreeable.

I answered your question, now answer my challenge. Though I'd throw in "Critical Thinking" to those definitions, just for the clarification of the masses.

Dammerung: I am arguing that the basic trouble with Atheism as an intellectual idea is that it throws out an entire range of human experience as being impossible, because it cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory. Sure, you can run an MRI on a meditating monk and find out some things about the firing of his brain. You can zap somebody with that magnetic field helmet and possibly induce a religious experience in any random bystander. But these things don't address the validity of the content of the experience.

The trouble with materialist atheism is that when a person who has had paranormal experiences starts to talk about them, he will immediately interject with "No no no that can't have happened. You were mistaken/ mispreceiving / hallucinating/ et c." and dismiss the contents of that experience entirely. An empiricist or scientist should take these matters seriously: since all we have to go off of is our own phenomenal experience, we should treat the things that happen in it meaningfully.

The materialist viewpoint treats dreams as being unreal despite the fact that they impress themselves upon our senses in the same way as waking experience. You can't measure a dream in a laboratory and experiments inside the dreaming world don't work properly, but that doesn't mean the experience isn't real. Dismissing the content of dreams as being unreal is a metaphysical proposition and not a scientific one - it approaches the matter with the idea that the only things that are real are things that can have their temperatures taken or can be put on a scale.

But oppression is real even if you don't have a thirty point scale and laboratory conditions. Cold is real, hurt is real, love is real, bravery and pleasing scents are real. Science is an intellectual tool with many uses, but it cannot be applied to everything. It is an improper use of science as a tool to say, "Dreams aren't real! We can't weigh them!" Which is what atheist-materialism does and why I consider it a metaphysical position.

Majin Gojira: Darn, I was just about to go and add a part about Atheism being flawed due to Skepticism.

But these things don't address the validity of the content of the experience.

This is a false premis. The context of the laboratory is meant to be as neutral as possible in regard to the experience that occurs. That's part of the nature of falsifiability.

You missunderstand why dreams are "dismissed". It is precisly because they are a Metaphysical supposition that they are ignored—though there is a good deal of Dream Study being done in Psychology (which, sadly, is considered the weakest of the Sciences due to its analysis of these processes). Where do you think the "phases of Dreaming" came from.

But oppression is real even if you don't have a thirty point scale and laboratory conditions.

That is such a bad example for what you are arguing it's laughable.

Cold is real,

And can be measured.

hurt is real,

And can be quantified.

love is real, bravery and pleasing scents are real. And Evolutionary Psychology exists to explain why the exist. Now THAT is a facinating field of research!

The problem with Metaphysics is that it does not seak to explain anything. It hits the wall of the "Metaphyscal" and does not seak to explain what it is.

Skeptics do not believe in Ghosts because no one has really defined what a Ghost is in objective (or as near to objective as we can get) terms.

What you're arguing against isn't atheism, but Hollywood Atheism. A Strawman.

Dammerung: Just because something cannot be tested in a laboratory doesn't mean it isn't real. Spontaneous remission of cancer does happen but it is not repeatable. To have science an event must be repeatable. Not all real events can be repeated in laboratory conditions.

You can't measure the feeling of cold. You can measure air temperature, you can measure certain neurological discharges. But no amount of scientific instrumentation could prove whether or not I feel cold in a particular room. Internal experiences aren't testable, but I would argue they are more real than, for instance, the laws of thermodynamics. Experiences are more real than concepts.

Ghosts are like this too. They exist within a liminal state - two people standing in a room, one will see it and the other will not. I think ghosts interact not with matter and energy but with consciousness directly. Aside some rather fantastical television shows of dubious merit, the kinds of instruments that will record certain frequencies of electromagnetic emission (video cameras) are not the kinds of instruments that will record the presence of ghosts. But say you've seen a ghost, and the atheist will harumph and draw up to explain to you why you should believe in a non-dual materialist theory rather than your lying eyes.

Majin Gojira: Just because something cannot be tested in a laboratory doesn't mean it isn't real.

But it is intelectuallty dishonesst to claim it is when you cannot substantiate the claim.

Spontaneous remission of cancer does happen but it is not repeatable. To have science an event must be repeatable. Not all real events can be repeated in laboratory conditions.

Appeal to the Unknown is extremely dishonest from my perspective. Science is about the exploation of the unknown. Just because we do not know the details now does not mean we will NEVER know the details.

You can't measure the feeling of cold.

The Feeling may be subjective, but the cold itself is not. And then there's a point where our nerves give out. Again, appeal to the Unknown. If the Unknown is all you have to offer, then what your offering is really Nothing.

But no amount of scientific instrumentation could prove whether or not I feel cold in a particular room.

Actually, those two processes in conjucture very well could. You deny what we've already discovered. You're like the people who are saved via surgury after an accident and then claim "It was a Miricale!"

Totally dishonest.

Internal experiences aren't testable, but I would argue they are more real than, for instance, the laws of thermodynamics. Experiences are more real than concepts.

You could ARGUE it, but you could not support it beyond the claim itself and thus, rationally and critically, it would be ignored.

Ghosts are like this too. They exist within a liminal state - two people standing in a room, one will see it and the other will not.

And yet there are claims of groups experiencing ghostly pheonomenon both visual, auditory and what not. Your "Working Definition" doesn't hold.

I think ghosts interact not with matter and energy but with consciousness directly. Aside some rather fantastical television shows of dubious merit, the kinds of instruments that will record certain frequencies of electromagnetic emission (video cameras) are not the kinds of instruments that will record the presence of ghosts.

Sadly, your theorizing is totally unsubstanciated and others who also believe in ghosts do not believe in them as you do. This goes back to the Dinosaur example in the later video. The Godzilla example that follows it.

To quote it:

We're[[Paleontologists]] always finding new things in the fossil record. That record is already much more rich than any layman would ever suspect, and some of the many things we've found were pretty weird. So all kinds of things might be there, including this: I call it Godzillasaurus dios. Is it possible that this once existed? Well, to be philosophically correct, I would have to say ‘yes’, it is technically 'possible' this form of Lepidosaur actually could have existed, and I concede that it is even conceivable that we could find it in the fossil record someday.

But let's forget what is possible, and concentrate on what is probable. Is there any reason to believe this particular gargantuan lizard actually did exist? No, nothing at all. I mean, there were several old folklorish movies about it, and there are a heckuva lot of Kaiju fans who would love it if this thing were really real once. But apart from some fanatic devotees and their beloved fiction, what evidence is there for Godzilla? Not one thing which could be verified by anyone. Consequently, there is every indication that the king of the monsters is just a made-up character.

If I found a five-toed footprint the size of a whole T-rex, that at least would be something. But it still wouldn't be enough to justify the illustration, would it? I would need volumes more evidence than that! I mean, how can I claim to know all these details about something I can't even show was ever real? Especially if I have no reason to imagine such a thing in the first place. Still, I live in a country where I have a Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom to believe whatever I want, and I’d really like to believe that something like this existed once. No one can conclusively prove that no extinct reptile could have looked like this, right? We’ll never discover every species that ever lived, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So don’t I still get to believe Godzilla was real, if I want to?

What if I then went on to list all sorts of other details I supposedly knew about Godzillasaurus? What color it was, or what its reproductive peculiarities were, or the unique way it would respond to certain stimuli, and I say all this as if I had the facts and test results necessary to prove each point, when I really don’t have any indication that anything like this ever even lived at all.

What if I still didn't stop there? What if I didn’t just say that Gojira could have existed? Given the utter lack of evidence, just that comment alone might have cost me my credibility as a scientist. If I even said he “probably” existed -my reputation would be ruined because I can’t substantiate that claim. But let's say I went several steps beyond too far, and stated flat-out that he did exist? Not that I "think" he existed, or that I "believe" that he did, but that I knew he did. What happens to my credibility then? Can one even say something like that and still be trusted anymore? If I have no positively-indicative evidence at all to back me up, and thus can't prove I’m right about anything I profess to know, then if I go ahead anyway and confidently posit that Godzillasaurus did in fact roam the Japanese islands two million years ago, would that be an honest claim?

Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is.

But say you've seen a ghost, and the atheist will harumph and draw up to explain to you why you should believe in a non-dual materialist theory rather than your lying eyes.''

You say that as though Ghost "Research" hasn't been debunk and explained by other phenomemon for almost one hundred years. There's a reason why the Spiritualism movement is dead—Science and Harry Houdini KILLED IT with Science. Exposing the frauds, charlatins and mistaken believers for what they were.

Like I said, you do not Understand what Atheism and Skepticism entail at all. You think its Hollywood Atheist type stuff or worse, a Flat-Earth Atheist who displays the same sort of intolerance for new information that contradicts their beliefst that the Religious and Believers have.

Sure, skeptics don't beleive in ghosts—that's because there's insufficient evidence for it. In a Court of Law, you could not prove the existence of Ghosts, so why do so in the realm of Science, where's it's even harder to do. This stems partly from the fact that, like you, you don't know what acceptable scientific evidence even is.

Appealing to the unknown tells us nothing and explains nothing, which is why appeals to the unknown are inherently worthless.

Dammerung: We've come to exactly the point I had hoped for. Where the only appeal is to the unknown. Because life is inherently a mystery. It comes from a mystery, it is sustained in a mystery, and it goes into a mystery.

I saw a Bodhisattva once, in the dead of morning. I was most certainly awake. The image lasted about 2/3 of a second, it was translucently glowing blue like Obi-Wan from Star Wars. She was wearing Buddhist vestments and had sutras pinned to it. What is the meaning of this? Dismiss it as a hallucination if you will, but what I saw was and remains a mystery to me.

Even mainstream scientific materialism appeals to a fundamental mystery - that of Big Bang. You ought to read the Tao te Ching. What I think is frustrating to you is that you want to be right about something that has no answers - you can't be right about the mystery so you want no part of it. But you are just a tiny tendril of that mystery and you could not escape it no matter what you do.

Majin Gojira: Just because life is a mystery, doesn't mean that we should equate it with the unknown. To the Atheist, that's tantamount to giving up. It's intelectually dishonest and lazy, as I've repeatedly stated. You act as though the Unknown is some big coup, when to me it's the height of sloth.

I saw a Bodhisattva once, in the dead of morning. I was most certainly awake. The image lasted about 2/3 of a second, it was translucently glowing blue like Obi-Wan from Star Wars. She was wearing Buddhist vestments and had sutras pinned to it. What is the meaning of this?

Here's a thought for you, why should it have a meaning?

Dismiss it as a hallucination if you will, but what I saw was and remains a mystery to me.

Okay. That's called your eyes playing tricks on you. Or to be more accurate, it is likely Pareidolia, hypnagogia or other form of visual hallucination—likely related to dreaming, ironically. The fact that it lasted for only a few seconds lends credence to this analysis. Or worse, you could be lying in an attempt to further your philsophical agenda. Both are more plausibel than "A Bohdhistava appeared to you, said nothing and disappeared, leaving no further evidence but your eye witness testimony."

Even mainstream scientific materialism appeals to a fundamental mystery - that of Big Bang.

Yet we strive to find out what it is, ergo, not relying on a "Fundemental mystery" showing once again you know naught of sceicne. We don't raise our hands and GIVE UP. That's what you're doing, and that's what so frustrating. You claim to have an answer, but in reality you have the unknown—which is the exact opposite of an answer and thus styming attempts to find the answer.

There are currently several Hypothesis regarding the explination of the Big Bang. These hypothesis range from String Theory to M(ultiverse)-Theory and their various permutations. For example, M Theory proposes that the mystery of the Big Bang was created by colliding parallel Universes (I believe Type III Parallel Universes—Yes, Science has categories for Parallel Universes. Isn't that Neat!).

You ought to read the Tao te Ching. What I think is frustrating to you is that you want to be right about something that has no answers - you can't be right about the mystery so you want no part of it.

No, we are activly investigating it as we speak. What's frustrating me is that you obviously know nothing about your oppositition and feign knowledge in a manner that is so ham fisted that it might as well be parody. You know nothing of scientific analysis, skepticism, logic, critical thinking or even the basics of how to argue. You simply repeat assumptions and expect them to be taken as anything but assumptions. What you think of those topics is little better than a Strawman.

Since you like them so much (even though I've repeatedly stated that they are the weakest form of evidence), I'll give you a personal example of how skepticism work in the form of my own pseudo-scienctific experience.

I once saw something in Lake Champlain. It is well noted folkloricly to have some sort of Stock Ness Monster roaming in it. My immideate thought upon seeing it was to label it such a monster. However, rationality took hold as what I saw was to small to fit the descrition of the beast of legend, and the movement—a swift up and down bob—did not fit with the behavior of such a beast. I researched the local fauna and put forward the hypothesis that what I saw was a freshwater otter. Later research and new information regarding the decay of logs in large, cold bodies of water lead me to dismiss the idea that it was even an animal, but simply a rotting piece of wood that rose to the surface through the buildup of gas and, upon releating said gas at the surface, quickly sank to the floor of the lake.

I did not just say "It's a monster!" and close my mind to inquiry. I activly researched and compared my fleeting memories to what was seen, changing my opinion as new information was introduced.

Compared to your Bohdistava experience, I'm positivly open-minded. You reached your conclusion based on pre-disposed opinions and then looked no further at it. THAT is my problem. You didn't check to see WHICH Bohdistava you saw, or try and confirm that it was a Bohdsitava and not some other entity taking its shape. You assumed and moved on with your life.

I wanted to see a Monster in Lake Champlain, but I did not. Its sad, but that's life. Please don't try and argue "But you really DIDN'T want to believe in a lake monster, and you slowly convinced yourself that you didn't see it!" For multiple reasons (mostly Intelectual Dishonesty, projection and blind assumption) but for the fact that I was a Practicing Catholic at the time I saw it, and reached the conclusion I hold today during that time period.

It also makes a mockery of the various Cryptozoological books and Paranormal Research Books I own. Yes, I'm a skeptic who owns Paranormal Research books that aren't ALL debunking texts.

Dammerung: Okay. That's called your eyes playing tricks on you.

You dismiss as irrelevant the content of my supposed hallucination. Jung believed that was the worst part of psychiatry - it treated people as a constellation of symptoms and completely disregarded their internal experiences. Why would I see a Bodhisattva? Why not Ron Paul or Peter Schiff, whose images I see more often? Why not my girlfriend instead?

Because what I saw violates your personal conditioning, you dismissed my perception as being in error rather than the worldview which denies it. There are many people to whom I could go with this perception who would believe me and think that this has significance. As to lying about divine things, I find telling the truth about them to be sufficiently dangerous without fabrication. If I was going to invent such a perception, I would have invented one a little more.. believable.

As to Superstring theory, it's no different from medieval Kabbalists mixing around the Torah. It is in no way science - science performs experiments on matter and energy. Math and models are useful but not scientific. They can sometimes point science in a useful direction, but one might say the same thing about alchemy or numerology or other occultism. Superstring theory is occultism with a grant.

Perhaps you saw a baby sea monster. The description you gave of what little you saw could be explained in dozens of ways, some acceptable to the mainstream and others not. While what I saw was extremely brief, it was also completely clear. I saw her head to toe. As for why I believed it was a Bodhisattva, well, I recognized her.

You define everything you see by trying to fit it into your preconditioned expectations about how the world works. I accept everything I see at absolute face value, and then try to develop a worldview wide enough to accomadate all of it.

Majin Gojira: Jung did some interesting research and did advance Psychology and Dream Study, there's no denying that, but you'd be a fool to think that we haven't made advances since the his time. The computer you use to type this is testament to that.

Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence. Your perceptions are your own, but the minute you try to convince people of what you saw, you are entering their realm of perception.

Because what I saw violates your personal conditioning,

No. Your conclusion is reached without adequate appraisal. Your Hypothesis was mistaken for a Conclusion, to be all Science-y about it.

There are many people to whom I could go with this perception who would believe me

They're the same sort of people who fall for Pyramid Schemes, Homeopathy and other bits of Psuedoscience. Appeal to Popularity remains a logical fallacy for a reason.

If I was going to invent such a perception, I would have invented one a little more..[.] believable.

Your graps of believability has been repeatedly demonstrated to be lacking since you do not even comprehend what you are trying to dismiss (Since you have yet to even try and counter this claim, I assume you agree with it—as per the Greek model of argument).

One of the most important laws of combat is to Know Your Enemy. You do clearly do not.

It is in no way science - science performs experiments on matter and energy. Math and models are useful but not scientific.

Rubber stamp the above statements.

They can sometimes point science in a useful direction, but one might say the same thing about alchemy or numerology or other occultism. Superstring theory is occultism with a grant.

String is weak as a theory, but unlike your Occult Explinations, we strive to understand. That's the key point you are ignoring: SCIENCE STRIVES TO UNDERSTAND

We do not "Know" we do not "dismiss" without reason. You may call this a "Preconditioned expectation" except its is one that is willing to change.

If indeed you saw a Bohdistava, you still did not try and ID her, you did not try and follow up on the experience nor do anything else than say "Oh, it must have been a Bohdhistava" and left it at that.

Intellectual Sloth, to repeat myself, since you did not address or counter it in any way.

As for my own model, I went through every one of those permuations you mentioned in my analsys, but for the sake of space (HA!) cut them. However, through the use of Occam's Razor (which I know you're going to dismiss offhandedly, because your philosophy demands it), I eliminated those that were less likely.

Once again, you confirm that you know nothing of Science.

I've asked you several times to give me yours already. Common curtosy would have been nice.

So for the benifit of readers, I'm going to provide a more accurate definition.

To quote AronRa again (because its fun).

Even at the kindergarten level, science is defined as a way of learning about the natural world; “natural” meaning, “in accordance with the laws of nature”. “Nature” is further defined as the sum of all forces or phenomenon in the entirety of perceptible reality. Everything that really exists has properties, and anything that can be objectively indicated, measured or tested is therefore natural. The supernatural is contrasted with this, being defined as that which is beyond the material universe, outside our reality, a transcendent dream-like dimension indistinguishable from the illusions of imagination, independent of, and even defiant of physical laws, and thus neither detectable nor describable by science.

You say that there's some other dimension to life, Atheists simply say "prove it." Often with a followup of "Use this methodology so I can be as sure as I can about my future decision." This, you would define as a Perceptional filter, but the meer concept of a perceptional filter going beyond the realm of the mind to me is ludicrous and worthy of mockery. It's like going into a court of law and saying that either side cannot use evidence because everyone will percieve it differently.

The above quote is also why claims of the Supernatural all fall flat on their face because the instant they enter the observable universe, it has properties and thus becomes Natural. It may be a part of nature we don't know about yet, but that does not change the fact that it is natural.

Your ideas regarding perception leave you incapable of providing the evidence I require yet you seek to convince an Atheist with little more than Rhetoric.

And that is the impass we find ourselves in. Your Philosophy is incapable of providing evidence, while that is what I demand. You may use Rhetoric all you like, but it will not get you anywhere without evidence. And not just anecdotal evidence, but concrete (relatively) evidence—something which you do not beleive to exist. To put it in legal terms, you literally have no case.

So, unless you can provide the evidence I need to be convinced, do not post again. More Rhetoric will just clutter up the page.

Dammerung: I shall post if I damned well please, and thank you for it.

What is an extraordinary claim, exactly? What is, shall we say, the scientific distinction between an extraordinary claim and an ordinary one? I have had two separate people, from different countries, on different sides of the continent, mention to me that they have had sex with Satan. They'd never met and had no relation. They came from different religious backgrounds. As for me, I don't find anything in particular extraordinary. Someone tells me that, and I don't "look for other explanations" anymore than I'd look for other explanations if someone told me they bought a new computer. Calling a claim "extraordinary" doesn't mean it is more or less likely to be real just that you are intellectually biased against it.

On the contrary occultism attempts very much to understand the world, but it does so from a human perspective. Occultism sees the world as a human construction. There is no natural distinction between objects and events; all distinctions are the product of the mind which distinguishes. You want, oh-so-badly, your laws of thermodynamics or optics to be real things in the world. But they are not. They are human inventions which describe certain (partially) consistent behaviors of events or objects within our phenomenal field.

Your search for evidence is barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to use the wrong tool (the scientific method) for the job (a thorough analysis and catalog of human perception, which includes dreams - hallucinations - hypnogogia - alien abduction - et c.)

Majin Gojira: And look at that, exactly what I predicted, with an added does of indignation!

It's so cute.

Because you have nothing more to offer than Rhetoric and, as expected, dismissed the very idea of evidence, I have nothing more to add. I'll let you dig your own grave with occasional Snark at this point. Clearly, that will be more constructive.

I'd ask you then what the proper tool was since you brought it up*, but given how you've answered my previous questions (IE: Avoided them completely), I won't get my hopes up.

• Depending on the response, I may expand on this point.

Dammerung: At last you ask a relevant question! What is the proper tool, indeed?

Well, meditation is a good one. Stare with your eyes open and your narrative mind silenced at your bedroom, and after enough time, you'll stop seeing a room full of things. Without the mind providing narrative content you become immersed in a sea of undifferentiated perception. This is a great tool for breaking conditioning that sublimates actual perception.

Make your room as dark as possible and shut your eyes and STARE. You'll see glowing dots for awhile, which will begin to form geometric shapes. Fractal looking things, moving around. Paisly-like patterns. Depending on how long you can concentrate, they will start forming faces and known things and eventually whole scenes.

Try to stay conscious as long as possible while falling asleep. Pay careful mind to hypnogogic imagery . If you have a dream, get out of bed and write it down. If you start feeling overwhelming terror for no apparent reason, you're doing it right.

The mind is a very useful tool capable of remarkable things. But it ALSO hides things from us. look, you can't aim a hydrometer at this "other world" and it doesn't give off particles. But it is there as real as this world is here, in your perceptions. What goes across is the consciousness which perceives. The world of perception is hugely, massively larger than the world of the mind.

Majin Gojira: And thus your need to proselytize is revealed, as I suspected.

You did not want to debate as I did, you wanted to preach. Again, Dishonesty shows its ugly face.

As a mater of fact, I practice yogic meditation and have gotten myself into hypnogogic states on multiple occasions. They are indeed fastinating and amusing, but unlike you I treat it as a neurological phenomon. Neuroscience is quite facinating.

Yes, I'm an atheist who does YOGA. Seriously.

Dammerung: They are indeed fastinating and amusing

Why would they not be real and indicative of real things? As to the neuroscience feint, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that correlation is not causation.

Personally I find that the things that impress themselves on my senses are more real and my ideas about things are less real.

Majin Gojira: Neuroscience feint? Seriously? It's not real because I call it neurological? Seriously? Do you even know the words that are coming out of your mouth?

And then you...God. Pot-Kettle-Black Again.

Well, folks, lets close down the dinosaur museum, because Evolution is Just a Theory! The Texas School Board was right.

Subjective impressions are USELESS to me. When will you get that?

Dammerung: Again - in what way is "neuroscience" an answer to "why are these perceptions not indicative of reality?" It's a non-sequitur.

Subjective impressions are USELESS to me.

and yet, they're the only thing you've got when it comes to whether it is safe to cross the street or whether you ought to turn on your heater...

Majin Gojira: No, it's a demonstration how you don't know what you're talking about, again.

Your worldview cannot handle people like me, and thus you sought to convert me to your way of psuedoscientific thinking, when it is a fruedian admission that your own worldview is as flimsy as the emperor's new clothes. It chafes you horribly that there are folk like me who loudly proclaim: "HEY! The Emperor's NAKED!"

Dammerung: My worldview handles you quite well. Your psuedoscientific ravings arise in my sphere of consciousness, I consider them, and I have a good laugh.

In what way does "neuroscience!" demonstrate that perceptions that arise within dreams are not indicative of reality? This is an important question.

Majin Gojira: Then why did you feel the need to passive-aggressivly preach to me?

And I hope you'll pardon me if I don't take your assesment of "Psuedoscience" at face value, given that you repeatedly refused to define Science, sketpcism, etc.

Dammerung: I can play the same childish pseudo-Socratic game.

Define

• Real
• Objective
• Exist
• Evidence

all terms I think you've used without sufficient understanding of what they mean.

Majin Gojira: Fair's Fair. I asked first.

Further, I'd ask you to clarify the context in which you want those definitions. Obviously, these will not be given in Laymens definitions, but I just want to be clear on the subject.

And that still doesn't address the core point: You. Were. Preaching. The amount of arguments you've had on this discussion page are testament to that fact.

Deny or accept, but by acceptance, you conceed your honesty.

Dammerung: of course I am preaching. You are not close enough to hit with a stick, the accepted Buddhist response to foolish comments.

You're looking for reality in words and trying to refine your words until you have a grip on reality. But the sphere of the mind is much, much smaller than the sphere of perception. It's a problem of volume. Ten gallons of shit in a five gallon bucket, as it were.

Majin Gojira: And I called myself a Jerkass first when the Buddhist is the one to offer violence as a solution to a Philosophical Debate!

Dishonesty it is then. Better to be dishonest than to waver in the faith, right? Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a Buddhist Zealot! If you didn't think it was possible, well now you know better!

What part of I'll let you dig your own grave with occasional Snark at this point did you miss, by the way?

And look at that! STILL Unanswered! Color Me "Surprised."

Dammerung: Answers come in words. The sphere of words is smaller than the sphere of perception. Consider the bandwidth differences between an encyclopeadia page and 10 seconds of 1080p video.

• You would obviously be amazed by how often in Buddhist literature (especially Zen) an argument is ended with "And then the master hit him" and this is considered a just response by all parties.
• I am not, in fact, a Buddhist. I'm not anything in particular. I find such definitive labels always fail to adequately describe my idea of the relation of self to the world.

Majin Gojira: Given your view of words, that's not surprising.

Unsurprised by violence in Buddhism, especially given the details of the Tibetan punishment system pre-China. I just play to people's perceptions when applicable.

But this also gets me to wonder why you even bothered to put those inadequate words here in the first place? Especially given the spectacular nature of your failure.

And look, no answers. Unsurprising.

Dammerung: mainly because I doggedly hold on to the foolish hope that a person might be convinced with words that words are not the last word in understanding the universe. Also because I find the advice we give others is generally the advice we ought to take ourselves and that the criticisms we direct against others are usually the ones we should bear ourselves. So I wanted to see what I said to you.

I would, however, be gratified if you were able to see that concepts and ideas are less real than rocks and trees and dreams and other content of phenomenal experience.

Majin Gojira: Wow.

Thanks for once again demonstrating that you have no idea how Facts, Scientific Theories and Scientific Laws, and yet to continually, arrogantly, speak about them as though you did.

Mr Death: Dammerung, you just said you can't answer his questions because words are meaningless. That's a wallbanger if I've ever heard one.Just give up already. You're not going to convince Majin Gojira because you're talking absolute nonsense. Everything you've been doing is just backpedaling. Your position is absolutely ludicrous, since you're rejecting, basically, reality as a whole and saying the only "real" thing is what happens in your own mind. This is serious tinfoil-hat-crazy-as-that-hobo-on-the-street conspiracy stuff that you're trying to pass off as...You know, I can't even tell what you're on about because nothing you've said makes any lick of sense.

Does light not exist because a blind man can't see it? Does sound, verbal communication, not exist because a deaf man can't hear it? Does a tree seriously not make a sound if nobody is there to hear it fall?

If words are pointless and meaningless, then why the flipping heck did you just spend the last 600 lines arguing about this?

Hey, here's your solution: Plug your ears, stick your head in the sand, and sing to yourself, and therefore we don't exist because you don't perceive us. There, problem solved, and we can go on to more meaningful things like debating whether or not a stick-figure halfling is going to be able to cheat death.

Dammerung: Your position is absolutely ludicrous, since you're rejecting, basically, reality as a whole and saying the only "real" thing is what happens in your own mind.

This is, in fact, what I have been arguing that he is doing. This is why the Bodhisattva as phenomenal experience was rejected out of hand - because it did not conform to the expectations within his mind as to how the world works. The materialist mindset rejects a huge amount of human perception because it violates the edicts of the mind.

Does light not exist because a blind man can't see it? Does sound, verbal communication, not exist because a deaf man can't hear it?

This is why I described a "network of subjectivity." I think objective reality is a metaphysical myth, like Plato's world of forms. "Reality" as it is described changes ceaselessly and is not a stable, real thing to which we can make an ultimate appeal. Reality is an idea about things and relations between things.

and we can go on to more meaningful things

You of course are free to do as you'd like.

Majin Gojira: This is why the Bodhisattva as phenomenal experience was rejected out of hand - because it did not conform to the expectations within his mind as to how the world works.

I think we can Basic Reading Comprehension to the list of "Things Dammerung Knows Jack About, but will talk at Length of Anyway."

Damemrung: At no point did you acknowledge that she could have been real and really there. It has no place in your worldview so there must be another explanation.

Well, perhaps I will seek another explanation for my phenomenal experience that seems to be car until I die of exposure this evening. But I suspect it would be foolish to do so. Another explanation is the matra of the materialist confronted with the fact that the content of our experiences greatly outstrips our explanations.

Majin Gojira: Remember this? Dismiss it as a hallucination if you will, but what I saw was and remains a mystery to me.

What's that? That's you inviting me to dismiss it! Reading Comprehension Fail TWICE IN A ROW! Let's go for three!

Of course the possibility exists, to be philosophically accurate, but it is extremely unlikely.

I bet you have nightmares of Occam's Razor on a regular basis.

Dammerung: By what standard do you judge it to be unlikely? There is no control group. No experiment can be performed. Likelihood, measurements of probability, are totally inapplicable in this case. There is no objective measure by which it can be judged likely to be a hallucination and unlikely to have been a true Bodhisattva. This is an adulteration of a meaningful scientific idea.

Just because I see something I do not expect which behaves in a way contrary to my experience does not make me pretend to myself that what I saw was unreal. I am really not prone to seeking another explanation in regards to sense data.

Mr Death: This is, in fact, what I have been arguing that he is doing. This is why the Bodhisattva as phenomenal experience was rejected out of hand - because it did not conform to the expectations within his mind as to how the world works. The materialist mindset rejects a huge amount of human perception because it violates the edicts of the mind.

No, see, that is only accepting things that conform to your world view. Majin Gojira, as he's said several times by now, questions and analyzes what he sees to find out what the real answer is. Saying "I saw what I saw, and and it doesn't matter what anyone else says," as you are if not word for word, is exactly what you're saying Majin Gojira is doing.

Reality does change. But that doesn't mean we can't understand it as it is, or that there's no such thing as "real".

Bottom line here: You're rejecting out of hand the idea of reality because it does not fit your own preconceived notions. Exactly as you've been saying Majin Gojira does, even though that's demonstrably not what he's been doing. How do you not see this? Majin Gojira has told you explicitly how he analyzes his experiences, and how outside influence has made him change his mind on things. If he was so closed minded and only accepted what he wanted to accept, he would not do that. Meanwhile, you refuse to accept anything besides your own opinion.

Dammerung: yes. I reject the idea of objective reality because it violates my notion of the world, and because there is no experiment that can be performed that can demonstrate its existence. There is no control group to which to compare it. It is something that by default is outside of our subjective experiences. It has no color, size, or weight. It is a metaphysical notion.

As to my response to Occam's Razor, it sits fine by me. My Razor response to the Bodhisattva vision is to say, "Now I must create a notion of the world with as few entities as possible that allows for the existence of Bodhisattvas with seemingly mysterious powers." I formulate it differently than you are prepared to, that is all.

Majin Gojira: You fail Occam's Razor too. Unsurprising.

And congratulations, you admitted to being a Zealot. Confirming once again that you are close-minded, hypocritical and addlpated. In other words This Trope.

Dammerung: You fail Occam's Razor too.

Of course! I do not formulate it in the same way and do not come to the same conclusion so I fail and must clearly be a moron. Occam's razor, you must know, is just an intellectual tool and does not demonstrate anything in and of itself. I might apply Occam's razor to claim there is only one entity in the universe, which is God, having a vast hallucination of everything-that-is. But that would be fail too, because it is an application of the principle which you do not agree with.

Let's use Occam's razor, 400 years ago. Sickness is caused by an imbalance of measurable humors in the human body. Anyone claiming that disease comes from tiny little biting creatures, which we have no instruments to see, is clearly insane. After all, why fill the world full of tiny invisible enemies of millions of different kinds when we have the four humors which can be measured and which we can manipulate with better-than-fifty-fifty results? Now take the leech already!

Of course I am a kind of zealot. Only a zealot would have carried on this metaphysical conversation for so long without any possibility of resolution.

Matthew The Raven: Sure, that's how parsimony would work. Now, let's say that we have the instruments to measure such a thing, which we did 200 years later. Now you can see microbes. And now you can incorporate them into scientific theory. Occam's razor is not "the simplest thing is always right," but "the answer with the least unproven assumptions that can explain all the evidence" is most likely correct. In fact, humourous theory would likely fail Occam's razor precisely because it was unable to account for contagion, and had to resort to "miasmas," poorly defined and therefore poorly theoretical "bad airs." Pathogenic theory is a better explaination than miasmas because they are a simpler explaination, as they don't invoke an entirely new type of undetectable matter.

Science is a self-correcting system of inquiry, unlike mysticism. That's why it's useful. While mysticism is entirely subjective, science does actually seem to come to some sort of consensus reality. While you may not like it's metaphysical claims of materialism, it's the only epistemological system that consistently produces results that reliable match observable reality. Sure, mystical experiences may be a connection to some higher truth rather than a neurological event, but as visions are nonreproducable, science has no way to study them, nor any reason to.

It just can't. Science is about studying nature, while magic is about circumventing it. Science has neither a method nor obligation to study magic.

Majin Gojira: I just want to thank Matthew The Raven for the defence of Parsimony.

I'd add more, but something tells me the mear act of me posting is going to rile things up again, so I'll just leave the gratitude and little else.

Dammerung: You keep making the same basic error. You're trying to argue for the preeminence of certain intellectual tools, I am trying to argue for the preeminence of strict empirical data. We have a much wider sphere of phenomenal data than we have rational explanations for it. So you try to strip down the empirical sphere until it is small enough to fit inside your rationalist sphere. This is madness.

Majin Gojira: Ahem—CALLED IT!

Matthew The Raven: It's not an error. I understand that science is limited in its abilities to study all phenonena, and yes, materialism is an unprovable metaphysical claim, like all metaphysical claims. But without using this materialist framework, science cannot do anything useful. If we allow miracles to be the explanation for natural events, then science just stops dead. It cannot experiment on such supernatural forces, as they cannot be defined. It's the same reason why another intellectual domain, say, Mathematics, can't study a psychological construct such as love. It doesn't have the equipment. It doesn't mean that love doesn't exist, but mathematics ignores it is a modelling algorithm.

The major problem with a purly empirical model is that senses can, in fact, be decieved. Trust me on this, the experiences one has during a psychotic episode are not real. I've had "mystical" experiences I can't explain, but I don't assume they're part of "reality" as everyone else would understand it. It's simpler to just assume I have an oddly wired brain than to assume everything that I've seen or dreamed up is true, even if they're eeriely prescient.

I throw my lot in with science because, quite frankly, it's the only intellectual field that routinely makes accurate predictions about the nature of reality. It may not be perfect, but it's the most rigourous and useful tool we have for gaining knowledge. And it's universal and egalitarian, unlike mysticism and religion, which are culturally bound and anthropocentric. A Mexican-American man and a Hmong woman and a schizophrenic Frenchman and a !Xu bushman can all perform the same scientific experiment and get the same response, and they could each use the results. However, if they all had a mystical experience, they experiences and sensory data reported back would be idiosyncratic, useless to each other and to everyone else in the world. That's why mystical fields have so many subdivisions, sects, and conflicts, while the modern scientific paradigm is the single most widely accepted worldview on the planet. It offers real answers backed up with universal evidence.

In order to topple the scientific model, not only would your explaination of the universe have to incorporate all the empirical evidence you believe science denies, it would also have to explain why science works so well as an explanatory model for everybody else. Basically, Explanation for Your Claims + A Better Explanation for the Data than the Scientific Paradigm can offer + Ability to make useful predictions = PARADIGM SHIFT.

Dammerung: I don't want to topple science. Science is a wonderful intellectual tool for many things! Science helps us develop better processors, fit more music on a hard disk, and can work alongside holistic and attitude-based approaches to medicine.

But I don't believe that strict materialism is a good explanation for everything humans experience. I think it simply falls short when it comes to determining how people remember, dream, think, form intentions... Materialism will always be plagued by the fact that a physical correlation between brain states and actions does not necessitate that the brain states cause the action. The fact that people can rewire their own mind or change the frequency of their EM waves by mere intention (ie: sitting down and meditating) implies to me that the brain might not be the causative agent but itself an effect.

Majin Gojira: Sounds like the God of Gaps to me. A classic example of an Argument from Ignorance. Once again, expanding the realm of the unknown and claiming the existence OF the unknown somewhow negates the ability to learn more and will remain a constant.

Perfectly in line with Cant—er Kant.

Dammerung First, what a childish fiddling with names. Second, I'm not a Kantian. I was criticizing Kantian 'real things' that supposedly hide behind experienced things.

Third, I think that you are immersed in God at this very moment. God in, of, and throughout you. Inside of God and by God you claim that God does not exist. So I take this conversation very tongue-in-cheek; God arguing with God about the existence of God within the context of God.

God's favorite form of humor is dramatic irony.

Majin Gojira: STEEERIIIIKE TWO! Ladies and Gentlemen!

Dammerung: you said I was positing a God of gaps. I said I was claiming just the opposite - that the whole thing is God and there is nothing apart from God by which God can be distinguished from it. how is this missing the point? Are you simply unable to comprehend novelty?

Majin Gojira: As a refresher from myself: Because you have nothing more to offer than Rhetoric and, as expected, dismissed the very idea of evidence, I have nothing more to add. I'll let you dig your own grave with occasional Snark at this point. Clearly, that will be more constructive.

In case you don't know, snark is generally defined as mockery, often of a sarcastic or even caustic in nature.

Just goes to show you haven't been paying attention to anything that anyone has said to you. I'm SHOCKED!

Dammerung: And what would constitute evidence? You've already thrown out personal experience as a possibility.

Let's dig into this problem deeper. How do you prove that a chair exists in a particular room? You go in and look, but there is a cognitive operation as well. You distinguish the chair from its surrounding enviornment based on its density in comparison to the surrounding air. Based on its electromagnetic radiation within the optical spectrum, as opposed to the radiation of the surrounding walls and floor.

But if my God exists, there is nothing to distinguish it from. There is no not-God against which God can be observed. No configuration of matter or energy can be directed that will distinguish itself from God. No laser will illuminate the particle of God because the laser and the housing and the vaccum in which it travels are all a part of God anyway. This is why science isn't the right tool for the question! There is no possible control group outside of God to which God can be compared.

This is why I appeal instead to the person experience of billions of people in history who claim that they don't believe in God but they have experienced God.

Majin Gojira: So "God Did It" is a suitable answer for a murder mystery in your worldview?

That's rather disturbing, actually.

Dammerung: judging by some of the things that transpire in this world, God has some serious problems.

For more metaphysics I have a rather Phildickian view of the Earth. There is a kind of mechanical problem within the framework of God in the local vicinity. Maybe just the planet, maybe the whole heliosphere, maybe the whole Hubble Volume. I see humanity's ignorance and self-harm as the result of a kind of mechanical fault with the "natural laws" or matrix of causation within our immediate part of God. So, the larger context of God gets negative feedback from our sector and sends in antibodies/recovery software/choose-your-metaphor in the form of Jesus and Buddha and other regular "enlightened" people to fix the fault and boot us back into the main structure of mental interconnectedness that should permeate the universe. We are cut off from our rightful understanding because we are controlled by a malevolent/indifferent archetecture.

Majin Gojira: and the trend of Completely Missing The Point continues.

Dammerung: Well, I'm a meta-gamer. I like talking about metaphysics, and you continue to refresh and respond to my posts almost as if hoping for a response. Everything seems to be perfectly in order to me.

Majin Gojira: No, you like intellectual masturbation.

But as long as we're talking about things we like, I should mention I like mocking stupid people. Not ignorant people, but willingly stupid people. There's a subtle difference as the later is intentional and thus worthy of contempt.

Dammerung: is that so? Well, self-denigration is after all a popular form of humor; you should go far.

Majin Gojira: YES! It CAN be taught!

Daily show style "Emperor's Naked" humor worked beter at the performances I attended, and has served me well here.

Yes, I've done minor standup comedy too. Why minor? Because it takes 100 performances before you can even call yourself an amature and keep track of how many pro-gigs you've done.

Jerrik: I don't really mean to insult any of you, but hasn't your discussion strayed a little far from what does and doesn't belong on The Fundamentalist page? It would probably be best to carry on this conversation somewhere else.

lockhead: Should we list Majin Gojira as a Fundamentalist?

Majin Gojira: Given I do not fit the generally accepted definition of such, then no. Sign you posts, please. Number one difference: I'm willing to change my opinion.

lockhead: Well I was just reading through here and a few of you have been here constantly for a week. And to think that might have been time you might have otherwise wasted.

Majin Gojira: Vehemence should not be mistaken for Fundementalism.

But yeah, I need a life.