SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
29d ago
Something that explains everything isn't much different that explaining nothing.
SwordOfOccam
29d ago
If you simply aim the level of epistemic rigor you have here at investigating claims of religion, the paranormal, aliens, or anything else supernatural you'll find I'm right.
I've looked into this question plenty. I was born into and raised in a religion that believed in the priesthood power, including healings and intercessory prayer.
None of it's true. If it were, we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation.
You can go read The Demon Haunted World for a thorough grounding in how to go about debunking this kind of thing.
The Catholics do try pretty hard to rigorously document miracles, but naturally non-Catholics don't tend to find them all that convincing.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
So would be any god worth caring about.
Some unchanging deistic "ultimate creator" who does not intercede in the workings of our universe is, by definition, pretty fucking pointless to care about.
And, of course, basically all religions don't have that kind of hands-off deity in mind.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
You asking for me to provide debunkings of claimed medical miracles is an great example of backwards thinking on how to go about evaluating claims of supernatural occurrences.
Weird shit happens all the time, but that doesn't mean it's a miraculous event from the Power of God. No study has ever demonstrated miracle healings working. There's a million dollar prize by James Randi for a demonstration of any occult power under laboratory conditions. There are tons of religious hospitals, why don't they have a track record of better outcomes than the secular ones? Anyone who could actually demonstrate a new power of healing or prediction or weather control would become immensely famous and presumably very wealthy. And yet no one can pull it off under strict scientific standards. Telling.
People used to take pictures of UFOs. They weren't really aliens. People still claim to have alien encounters and see ghosts and all that kind of thing. Yet the evidence never seems to get better. The most recent brand of UFO hype is over military systems detecting strange objects, which often turn out to be balloons and artifacts of the cameras.
If aliens were such advanced fucking space creatures capable of spaceflight then presumably they'd be even more impossible to detect than NGAD if they so chose. (Also NGAD stuff purposely tries to avoid airspace where casual observation would occur and has never been known to try to abduct someone. Note that some portion of UFO claims were in fact US military aircraft, so it's really ironic you bring that up.)
Constant streams of major claims backed by shitty evidence is good evidence of shitty claims due to human foibles, not that there's really something there. If there were something really there, at some point we'd expect strong evidence to emerge. People are certainly highly motivated to look.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
You're talking about an organization that purposely places children in harm's way so that they might be killed.
It's plainly obvious that Hamas would tell just about any lie they think they could remotely get away with. You are imagining that such a story would hurt "enrollment and morale" for Hamas when lies of Jewish atrocities are commonly used to rally support and incite hatred. Thinking "well this lie would hurt Hamas more than it would Israel" is not a rational take, particularly if you consider that any Israeli with half a brain knows that to actually conduct such torture (beyond the traditional kinds) would be to risk enormous blowback.
It's also curious that the NYT did the story as an opinion column, instead of a full investigative piece.
And it's sure one hell of a coincidence that the story came out just as Israel was publishing more details about the atrocities on Oct 7th.
Absent any hard evidence (and there isn't any, right?), anyone with any sense has to come down on this almost certainly being fabricated.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
Daniel Dennett called this "belief in belief."
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
The history of humanity is filled with superstitious beliefs, many of which have gone out of style, or are extremely niche.
People believing dumb things, religious or not, is a universal.
In contrast, no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works. Some religions believe their priests have the Power of God, but they can't seem to demonstrate it.
There's the same documentation problem for UFOs and Bigfoot: high resolution cameras are in everyone's pocket for a decade+ now and yet we don't see increasing evidence.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
We in the West still have a social norm against forced bestiality.
There's pretty obviously more of a motivation for Hamas to lie than there is for any Israeli to think it is remotely a good idea to do something cartoonishly evil, if for no other reason than the risk of discovery and blowback.
There are so many documented cases of Hamas and its supports lying that one should be immediately dismissive of any major claim that doesn't come with hard evidence. FFS the fake starving Gazan kid photo just got the Pulitzer.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
The argument then is not that The Universe is an exception, but that the Universe is not these things. The Universe did not begin to exist, and The Universe is not contingent, meaning The Universe couldn't be anything other than what It is, or as the Philosophers call it, The Universe is the/a Necessary Phenomenon - necessarily that which It is.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
What made New Atheism vulnerable to Atheism+ was that it already had a strong left-leaning majority and so progressives could try a takeover. This general trend affected basically every left-leaning space during the Great Awokening.
Many of the most prominent New Atheists went on to be antiwoke, notably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.
So you can pretend it was that New Atheists had a "deep ignorance" but I think you're making most of that up. The average New Atheist knew/knows a lot more about the topics you list than the typical believer. I'm pretty sure whatever his failures, Daniel Dennett did not lack for a lack of philosophical understanding...
At the end of the day, no religion has managed to prove itself true to other religious folks. Atheists are merely considered impolite for recognizing the consistent lack of proof.
Frankly, I find most annoying the "sophisticated" believers who can't quite truly believe, but look down on both the atheists and the true believers.
Also, it's always funny to see someone ostensibly defending religious faith by accusing materialists of "blind faith."
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Sometimes, "hitting them back first" via a preemptive defense is justified, but things get really murky in terms of certain knowledge.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Yeah, that's cope right there.
Especially given that GOP officials are on the record about it.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Ah yes good point.
Islamic terror/violence used to be neither right nor left-coded, but as of late it’s pretty left-coded.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Paul Pelosi was attacked and it was very common to propagate a false narrative about it being a relationship issue and jokes were rampant. Very bad taste. Seems suggestive of the Right’s attitude toward violence against its political opponents.
You’re hilariously trying to establish a required level of evidence that must be equal, instead of being able to extrapolate from incomplete evidence. The counterpart of this would be for me to point out you can’t prove the negative if an exact case on the other side has not yet happened. I suggest you try reasoning from impartial evidence instead of trying to incorrectly try to win a logical argument.
Here’s an interesting fact that turned out to be a bit predictive:
The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party.
Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.
https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-jim-jordan-threats-54eeecef0188edfcb9903e45019f190f#
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/threats-us-public-officials-democracy-invs
I don’t believe this is common among Democrats.
So yeah, I think it’s preposterous to pretend that the present American Right doesn’t have a political violence problem, even if it’s not exactly the same or as large as what we are seeing from the Left re: Kirk.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Buddy why are you conflating a hypothetical with evidence? Obviously my model is not “evidence” and I never claimed it was.
My evidence that the American Right would not act with restraint were the tables turned is that it’s the kind of people who liked Rush Limbaugh and elected Donald Trump and mocked Paul Pelosi.
Propriety and restraint is certainly not a standard part of the MAGA package and it’s remarkable to me that such an obvious fact is being contested, as if the Left is full of hateful hooligans and the Right is just peaceful folk who mind their own business.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?
I just don't understand a model of today's right that isn't crass.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
I agree that the mainstream left typically is blissfully unaware of the hard left and when it's forced to look at it usually makes excuses.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Has a prominent lefty social media star been murdered of late?
I'm not aware of any and so I was presenting a hypothetical. The way the right reacted to the Pelosi hammer attack seems to indicate things won't be all that responsible.
Please don't pretend that the party that elected Trump is all about decorum and dignity and not speaking ill of the dead when it's someone they detest. If Hasan Piker gets merked tomorrow there will be a lot of the same nonsense from the Right.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Eh, I think it's easy to carry this too far.
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
It's very hard to estimate which "side" is "worse" on an issue like this (whereas on some issues, there is a clear asymmetry, like publicly expressed racism against whites and sexism against men).
Though I must say that, right now, as an "antiwoke" atheist classical liberal, many on the Left would certainly celebrate my death as a racist/sexist/fascist/transphobe and probably the Right wouldn't as a godless heathen, though I have only voted for Democrats for president and have harshly criticized the Progressive Left and the MAGA Right while holding social views roughly consistent with a typical 2012 Obama voter.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
What I'm seeing is not that the attack was rightwing, but that the Right was very crass about it.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
The Jan 6 vs. BLM riots or whathaveyou is not an apples to apples comparison.
I had a BLM march a block from my house and damage done within a mile.
But BLM did not attempt to thwart the constitutional process of a presidential election.
Just focusing on "how much violence was there" or "what was the material impact" doesn't capture the badness of Jan 6 relative to more routine bouts of violence.
I agree that in general leftwing violence gets downplayed and rightwing violence is overhyped in polite society, but Jan 6 was quite bad as a political issue and could have been a lot worse if things had gone slightly differently.
Imagine if CHAZ/CHOP and Jan 6 switched political polarities and what would be said about them by the relevant sides. Obviously the Left would demonize CHAZ/CHOP and at least make excuses for Jan 6 being an attempt to oppose a very bad president. What would the Right do?
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
Isn't the limited data on MtF trans violence disproportionately high, inline with males who suffer from mental illness?
If this killing turns out to be "trans related," it wouldn't be coded as having been done by a trans person, obviously.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
A relative expressed that at least Kirk couldn't force his daughter to not have an abortion from rape.
SwordOfOccam
9mo ago
No it isn't.
(Yes it is.)
This just seems patently insane to me.
Obviously it is. Hammering Israel in the sphere of public opinion has been a major effort by Hamas and its supporters.
Hence another reason to sign up to kill the Jews. They're so evil.
Even if I allow for the questionable assertion that these alleged dog rapes somehow negatively affect Hamas recruiting, you're just wildly out of reasonable waters to think it hurts Israel less.
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