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Author Topic:   Broken Thinking Skills & Pointless Discussion
Tangle
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Posts: 9583
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 6.5


Message 1 of 2 (881310)
08-22-2020 2:51 AM


We seem to be attracting only the nutters now.
Not all religious believers are nutters, but you wouldn't know it if you came only here.
I really don't know why we engage with them anymore, nothing can be achieved, we've heard everything, they don't even provide entertainment, trying to reason with them is just cruel. Never try to teach a pig to sing; it doesn't work and it annoys the pig. You can't reason people out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. etc
The real problem is that humankind has only recently learned how to reason in quantity. It’s spent many thousands of years not reasoning, relying on superstition, folk stories and doctrine - only a minority of humanity can do it naturally now.
I've been reading a few threads on Evolution Fairy Tales, it's an echo chamber for even more of these wing-nuts ruled over by the self-impressed Mike the Wiz. He turns up here from time-to-time to show off his superior knowledge of fallacies. He's a weird one. He knows about logic but he can't apply it. He's a transitional human - the irony. He really thinks that he can think rationally but he can't. Like Faith, he's a motivated thinker, he knows his conclusion is 'therefore God' so everything starts backward and he falls at the first logical fence. eg
A FoE acolyte provides this pseudo-logical nonsense
quote:
P1 - Without God objective moral values would not exist
P2 - Evil exists
C1 - Objective moral values exist (from P2)
C2 - Therefore, God exists (from P1 and C1)
So Mike replies with
quote:
This seems like a pretty good and strong philosophical argument.
Surely even he knows that that's a pile of illogical horse dung?
I find this sort of thing very hard to understand. Neither he nor Faith are stupid, they're both reasonably intelligent it's just that their intelligence has been corrupted by the religious disease that prevents rational thought. They can learn the rules of logic and science but break them all the time, perhaps without knowing. (But increasingly I think it's deliberate.) They then go on to accuse those pointing out their errors of being irrational.
I suppose it has to be because they're all self-taught and uneducated. They've never had anyone with real training to correct them, they impress each other and that's good enough for them. If you've never properly studied a scientific discipline (or philosophical one for that matter) you have no concept of the sheer volume of real, proper work lying behind all of it and the intellectual rigour applied. I get the impression they think it's just a bunch of people with opinions and they have opinions too so their's are just as valid. They've no experience of violently clever, ultra-knowledgeable people tearing lumps off your work because it lacks evidence, completeness or clarity or simply because it's wrong.
They rarely actually understand evidence, but are confident that they do and that their intellect is far beyond others. Juvenissun is the latest to follow this superior, gnomic approach, refusing to provide a full argument, state his position or provide real information, while simultaneously talking down to everyone. He has superior, yet hidden, knowledge and we are obliged to sit at his feet chiselling out a hard won truth from the master.
quote:
I give you evidence, a very very strong evidence. However, you may not understand the evidence.
The evidence is: the earth has vast amount of ocean water in contrast to the mass of land.
Can you "reason" on my evidence? I don't believe you can.
Total garbage, but he thinks he's so, so clever. It's actually a form of trolling. But there's no moderation on this site anymore and we're so grateful for any discussion that we allow him his plinth.
He's also a fan of the patronising teacher approach that so many of them seem to exhibit. I think it's from the priest in the pulpit - they get so used to being the leader of the uncritical pack. They have egos the size of a small planet. At least two of them here think they're writing science books. Creationist after creationist comes here knowing - just knowing - that they can disprove evolution using pseudo-science and homespun logic. We tell them that that's Nobel prize work and they agree, they're up for it!
Many of them have learned some of the language of science but totally misuse it - like Mike with his faux-logic and fallacies. Here's one of the biggest idiots on FoE
quote:
Redblood cells AND Carbon 14 found in the SAME Dinosaurremainsare evidence for the recentflood ofNoah!
When someone challenges him he replies
quote:
It is called CORROBORATING HARD DATA that confirm that Dinosaurs are 1000s and NOT 100 million years old..
It looks like God and hisSon were right about the worldwide flood of Noah.. Something you might want to think about.... Or not.. I dont really care what you think anymore.. Best wishes..
They take a finding from real science, fail to understand it, or deliberately misrepresent it, then claim it as proof for a biblical story. It's hard to know where to start with this kind of dishonesty and ignorance.
A big part of their certainty is that many consider themselves 'saved'. Despite their book telling them that no one can know that. Many/most also think that god talks to them. I suppose that is the ultimate 'evidence' into which everything else must fit regardless of how objectively wrong it is proven to be.
But why being born again, saved and having god talk to you means that the earth is 6,000 old is beyond me, and why seeing that incontrovertible error in others, it doesn't make those that god also talks to think 'hang on, how can that be, God's saying different, contradictory, things to him than me?' I really don't know.
YECs are one thing but the pure batshit crazy are another. Why do religions attract so many plain loonies? Our current contender for loonie of the board is Base12
quote:
EYES = ELECTRONS = SPIRIT
Not convinced?
The Word of God teaches Truth...
Somehow I fail to find that convincing of anything other than psychosis.
Having spent several hours reading threads on FoE I really struggled to continue to read the posts of the YECs. It's really hard to read because it offends the intellect; I imagine they think the same reading the explanations of the scientists and atheists. That's also hard to understand. The two sides are not equivalent. The science side can often fairly simply demonstrate how a particular fact is true while the other simply denies the fact with no understanding of how the fact was derived. So you get the situation demonstrated perfectly here...
Bot Verification
... where the YEC is denying something using 'science' that he doesn't understand and is, as they say, not even wrong.'
This gap can not be bridged without education because without education these people 'know not what they say'. They think they're using science but they're not because they don't know what science is, they've never been exposed to it, never experienced it and their egos are so large that they think their armchair theorising *is* science.
I don't think that there's much to be done about this except educate, educate, educate and let a lot of time go by.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

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Message 2 of 2 (881312)
08-22-2020 3:16 AM


Thread Copied to Is It Science? Forum
Thread copied to the Broken Thinking Skills & Pointless Discussion thread in the Is It Science? forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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