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Author | Topic: Broken Thinking Skills & Pointless Discussion | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
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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: So Mike replies with
quote: 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: 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: When someone challenges him he replies
quote: 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: 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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5 |
Phat writes: Yes, I believe that God talks to me, though very rarely and often quite subtly. It is very rarely perceived as an audible voice but more of an epiphany...an impression. Of course we have better answers than god talking to you, but that aside, why does the god that talks to you say different and contradictory things to the other people?
Loons are necessary on a forum such as this. They provide an opportunity for contrasting and comparing thought processes. The issue is that the loons are always believers. That should tell you something.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5 |
Phat writes: Some may say I prefer fantasy over reality. Some would say I was mentally ill. You don't need to feel ill, delusions don't necessarily make you feel unwell; often they're very comforting. Particularly the imaginary friend kind.
I feel fine and don't even think about such things on a daily basis. You come here everyday and talk about what you've been researching, reading and talking about.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
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Really, really bored now. COVID is killing me and I haven't got it yet.
This is another post from MiketheWiz on Evolution Fairy Tales, it's a mirror image of what we say and do here
wibble, an atheist writes: The evidence from the fossil record is compelling. You never find modern mammals (such as dogs) in the Triassic, you never find flowering plants (such as bananas) in the Carboniferous and you never find ray finned fish (such as salmon, which include 99% of all existing fish species) in the Cambrian. Etc. etc. etc. You have no sensible answers for these facts that fly in the face of your faith. MtW replies (sometimes in red ink, and bold type as they seem to do in these places)
MtW writes: WARNING. These things have been addressed before and there are answers for them by creationists you have been given. The epithet, "sensible" is BS. This is rhetorical phlegm, there should be no more of these bare-assertions here about things you have been refuted on many times before. The answers have been given and none of the forms you mention can be shown to have any intermediates from previous ancestors. DO NOT TROLL THE FORUMS with ad nasueam PRATTS that have been addressed time and time and time again, which clearly shown you had not even a basic grasp of logical reasoning. As creationists our model does not depend on finding modern mammals such as dogs in the triassic but I did show you a chart of push-backs that have been found earlier and earlier. But we do not need to chase that red-herring because our model does not predict a dog would have lived in an ecological zone with dinosaurs, such as the triassic which for creationists would represent a preserval of a certain area that existed. Because our model means such rocks were trawls of certain areas, and we do not argue they are eons of time, then no, it is a red-herring fallacy to argue that we should expect such patterns in the rocks to be different. The pre-flood world was full of forms now extinct and it is impossible to predict the food-chain and ecological zones that would have existed because the post-flood world is like another planet. The answers are there, you are simply too stubborn to understand why they refute your objections. And how many times do you need teaching these things? A teenager of poor to average IQ could understand it well by now. I propose you are simply A LIAR. What it possible in these situations? They have invented a world where what he says makes sense, it's a total alternative reality that they can inhabit and no amount of fact can change it.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5 |
Phat writes: I dont care whether Adam, Eve, and the snake were literal or metaphorical You really should. If Adam and Eve were not real then there was no Fall. If there was no Fall, Jesus was not required to be sacrificed to save us from it. The whole pack of cards collapses.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
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Phat writes: Biblical Literal-ism does not have to be true but the Virgin Birth and character of Jesus Christ does. Pick 'n mix Christianity. But you need to take that point seriously, Jesus died to atone for our sins, but if there was no original sin, why bother?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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
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MtW writes: Rational thinking I'm going to take a couple of your statements/rebuttals that I feel are relevant to the arguments I'm making about thinking skills. But before I do that I want to make a couple of points that you feel passionate about and repeat over several replies that I'm going to say are either irrelevant accepted or missing the point. The first is ad hominem. You should note that in my OP I mentioned several creationists and gave examples of how their thinking is either wrong or just plain mad. You are only one of them and my attack is not on the person but their approach and thinking abilities as demonstrated in those posts. It's a diagnosis based on the evidence not a personal attack. Of course you might feel that it's an insult, but that's your problem not mine. The second is intelligence. You are very fond of quoting your extreme intelligence. I've called it bragging in the past and your posts are full of your own self-importance; Mr Toad appears regularly. But my complaint is not that creationists are stupid - though some definitely are, and others are crazy with it - I have said that I think that both you and our very own Faith are obviously intelligent people. No, it's the application of that IQ that is broken. There is no point owning a long lever if you don't also use a fulcrum.. So, the specifics.
Rational thinking and having faith in God are not mutually exclusive and that is the implicit premise in your argument. This is wrong. Most scientists have some form of faith in some form of god(s) and, of course, it was Christian creationists that showed young earth creationism to be wrong. One of the greatest scientists that ever lived - Maxwell - was a devout Christian, as were most early Victorian scientists. They all believed that both science and religion were correct and it was only a matter of understanding science better to understand god. They applied scientific principles to understand our world and unfortunately, many of their observations and conclusions differed with their conventional views of theology - more correctly, the bible stories. Nevertheless, many of those scientists pursued science even when it appeared to contradict their beliefs; they would not subvert reason. As a result many holy cows had to be slaughtered and religious ideas re-evaluated. heliocentricism, immutability of species, young earth etc. These people were able to objectively evaluate their observations regardless of religious belief. Real scientists and proper critical, independent thinkers. In contrast, the remaining creationists of today are imbedded in their belief. Faith for instance said many times that when the facts contradict the bible, the facts are wrong. This is the opposite of science. You have your conclusion which can not be changed and you attempt to find a methodology and a set of observations which fit the conclusion. In the process of doing that you abandon any facts which don't fit. That process can not work. The current creationist movement is founded on that form of motivated thinking and can not make progress until and unless it understands its inbuilt design flaw - the answer flows from facts to conclusion, not from conclusions to facts. The quote in the original post shows this thinking bias at work
quote: So Mike replies with
quote: I don't believe that you thought about that response for a second, but if you do now, surely you can use your enormous intellect and vast experience in logical thinking to point out the errors in that? The second point I want to make about intelligence is about training and education. From conversations here and at EFT it's apparent that creationists are very badly educated. Few have any qualifications in the subject that they're discussing and so far you yourself have failed to rebuff this suggestion with any qualifications of your own. Education and training provides both the facts and the thinking skills and, in the case of science, the methodologies required to think in a straight line. Those skills are almost non-existent amongst creationists. My guess is that this is because they are almost all self-taught. Faith liked to argue against pretty much all of science - biology, palaeontology, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology, astronomy, astro-physics, geology, chemistry etc etc without having a single qualification in any of them. There really is only so far you can go with that kind of approach. And it's a very short distance. People that have not experienced research science can have no understanding of how robust and challenging it is. If all you've done is sit in an armchair and google, you really haven't the first clue. Those kind of opinions are worthless. To be of any use in solving the problems of our world your IQ needs to be Used objectively to the point of obsession and educated in the methodologies that produce that objectivism. Without that, you're just another cracked pot.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5 |
Phat writes: but some day you will remember your decisions. And it always ends with this threat. Get a life Phat, just get a bloody life; this is the only one you get, for god's sake get off your knees and do something useful with it.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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5 |
I watched an old discussion between Richard Dawkins and Wendy White a creationist. I wanted to see if I could work out what was happening because it seems to show every form of broken thinking that there is. (Plus pointless discussions.)
Dawkins was trying very hard to get her to think about what he was saying, but she wouldn't or couldn't or both. I think mostly she didn't know how. Her thinking was all over the place, she had a lot of statements about her position and beliefs of course, and she also had a bunch of disconnected rehearsed rebuttals - a defensive shield of learnt but not understood assertions and 100 year old frauds that she used to fend off Dawkins' arguments. To be fair to her, she was being filmed and being spoken to by someone she probably thought was the antichrist, her shields were fully up. Even so, it was a pretty complete demonstration of uncritical thinking; with all the faux logic, diversionary behaviour, false 'facts' and inability to reason. She constantly changes the subject when confronted with a fact or position she didn't like and when all else failed accused Dawkins of ad hominem. Dawkins can be a bit of an arse at times but you could see him holding himself back and really trying to communicate with her. Like all fundie creationists she equates evolution with atheism and atheism with evil, to her they obviously all seem to be the same thing and all merge into one in her mind. The fact that most of the Christian churches accept evolution doesn't change anything for her. She thinks that if evolution was true then we would become communists or nazis - or be forced to behave like them. It was a very strong association in her mind and although Dawkins said many times that he completely agreed with her that society run along evolutionay lines would be revolting she simply can't get that people have evolved beyond the purely animal and no longer behave solely on instinct and evolutionary lines. Somehow she seems to think that if evolution was a fact we'd all have to behave like animals. There were lots of things that amazed me but the one that really got me was when she told Richard Dawkins - Fellow of the Royal Society, emeritus fellow of New College Oxford and University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science, a world famous evolutionary biologist - that there was no evidence for evolution, just sketches and models. When Dawkins pointed out that that just wasn't true, that the evidence is in all the museums of the world she just has to go look at it, she said that she had and it wasn't there - just sketches and models! Denying facts is the hardest part of all this. How the facts are interpreted is different to denying the existence of the facts themselves. She has no qualifications in science but can tell a world-class evolutionary biologist that fossils don't exist. It's this amazing arrogance that gets me. Behind her defensive bluster is a belief that she feels is threatened by discoveries of science and no amount of evidence and logic will shake that. It's very strange; she has no doubt that she's right about things that she is just totally wrong about. Full version
Highly edited short version
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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Tangle Member Posts: 9583 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 6.5
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Phat writes: Though I'm quite sure that much of my thought process is also "broken" and uncritical. It is, but it is something you can learn to do, it's a simply acquired skills. And the beauty of it is that the skills can be applied to anything. It's not a religious thing.
I know that I will never "throw God away" as jar suggests, yet am learning why I fall on this side of the fence rather than on Richard Dawkins side. You don’t have to throw god away, you just have to discard all the utter bollox that goes with the process of believing. You could see even from that short clip that she simply could not think in a straight line. Her particular belief corrupts her entire ability to think critically.
By "most of the Christian Churches" you are likely referring to the Roman Catholic position which fully accepts Evolutioon as a viable concept. No, I mean most Christian churches. Obviously the Catholic church accepts evolution which is the majority Christian belief system anyway, but so does Anglicanism and pretty much all others except the total loony lot. I understand that you live in the US and that the US is a total outlier as far as religious belief and evolution is concerned but most of the rest of the world looks on in amazement.
Im quite sure that most all Episcopal Churches would agree and that only thew modern day evangelical fundamentalists would put up much of a fuss. There you go. It's not a hard point to grasp that evolution and atheism are not the same thing, not even related. But I'm only using the evolution thing to provide an example of how a belief can corrupt the thinking process.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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