Mrebo

“But what if there are 10 babies on the floor of the Senate?”

That would be an improvement over the current number.

This guy again.

chyron8472 said:

There was plenty of derision and mockery about God in the Religion Thread, but it stayed in the Religion Thread. This spilling of it out into the rest of Off Topic is bothering me because I can’t purposefully avoid it when it pops up in random places.

That is, people can believe what they want to believe, but derision about something to which I believe as strongly as I do is annoying when it’s not compartmentalized to a space where it belongs.

So, in church? (See what I did there?)

But seriously, you have an unusual definition of derision and mockery if you think there was any just now in RT.

DominicCobb said:

And then He said
“Alright children, Daddy’s home. Time to shut the fuck up.”
Mature Adult 4:18

Yeah, not a fan of swearing as I’ve previously remarked.

Not sure what chyron’s post is relevant to.

I’m digging Jay being more present and hands-on. Also makes me think of recent Religion discussion about God. In the OT (Old Testament), God periodically left people to their own devices until he had to step in and smite because people weren’t following the rules.

That’s disturbingly hilarious.

Dog reactions really should be a staple. At least the dinosaur didn’t sexually harass anyone. That investigation would have dragged out for months.

suspiciouscoffee said:

I added a Bat, though his pose might be too Spidey-ish.

I like that he’s flying a kite.

chyron8472 said:

Mrebo said:

sasquatch

Okay, wait. If there is one sasquatch, there will be many sasquatch. There will be, or will have been, enough sasquatch to sustain the species for at least some period of time. There is not just one singular sasquatch (or Loch Ness monster for that matter) that is hundreds of years old.

Unless they are Sith Sasquatch and there can always only be two.

Yes, more than one: sasquatchi. I don’t think there are so many of them now. I hope to meet one someday.

chyron8472 said:

In the interest of finding books I can someday read to my daughter, I’m currently listening to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s actually pretty good. Made me laugh multiple times so far.

I hope you read/listen to other of Baum’s Oz books, they are a lot of fun. The 2nd one, The Marvelous Land of Oz is among the better of them. Baum enjoys puns and sneaks in many double meanings that are easily missed.

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

CatBus said:

Which is why the duck was set up as the less preposterous example. You start adding new roles for God and it just gets further and further out there.

But it’s not adding new roles, but a fundamentally different conception of God. Whether one finds any particular asserted attribute of God to be implausible or absurd can be discussed. Some claimed qualities will be more like feathers and bills, but we must also be on guard not to dismiss possible attributes just because we don’t like them.

You’d started on this point earlier. i.e. Just take a conception of God, strip out all the stuff you find implausible, and what you’re left with is a concept of God that works for you.

The trick is, with me, if I strip out all the stuff I find implausible, what I’m left with no longer qualifies as a god in any sense. In fact, I’m pretty sure what’s left is just a squirrel. You know, mammals being less offensive than birds and all that 😉

I’m not saying strip stuff out until it works for you. I’m saying through the application of reason (and increased knowledge) certain conceptions may be effectively ruled out (eg those that resemble an unknowable and irrelevant cosmic duck) while others remain plausible, whether or not one accepts them as fact. The idea that any concept of God may be ruled out remains, as Frink said, more unlikely than someone knowing for certain that God exists.

If you treat God as man’s own creation from the get-go then that is where you will end up. Your standard for implausibility remains opaque. The cosmic duck may be - unbeknownst to you - conveying the secrets of the universe to you, but there is plenty we might say is “implausible” without indicating we actually possess especial insight. I wager there are people here on both sides of the debates over time travel, string theory, sasquatch, ghosts - I find the first two implausible, though I wouldn’t say I know they are false, and the latter two factual.

I still don’t know how anyone can have such certainty to know there is not a God.

*Squirrels, who have a longstanding feud with birds, are awesome.

TV’s Frink said:

The space duck might be real though.

Sans feathers and bill, maybe.

CatBus said:

Which is why the duck was set up as the less preposterous example. You start adding new roles for God and it just gets further and further out there.

But it’s not adding new roles, but a fundamentally different conception of God. Whether one finds any particular asserted attribute of God to be implausible or absurd can be discussed. Some claimed qualities will be more like feathers and bills, but we must also be on guard not to dismiss possible attributes just because we don’t like them.

TV’s Frink said:

Dek Rollins said:

Handman said:

Baseball caps.

I’m not crazy!

England is 19

England can drink in just two more years!

In 11 years we’ll let England date.

TV’s Frink said:

Well generally one requires the other…

No wonder when I ask my girl if she’s devoted to me she says, “we’ll see.” What a relief.

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

Sure, atheists view things differently, but the kind of duck deity you conceptualize is wholly unlike God conceived by most theists.

The duck was created with the following criteria: no matter how preposterous the rest of it was, it must not be disprovable. So not wholly unlike – your modern gods were created with the same overriding criteria.

That something can’t be disproven or fully understand doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Science proceeds on all manner of theories that can’t be disproven.

Ah, that’s the point of contention, and it’s based on a misunderstanding of the duck post. It’s not the lack of disprovability that means it doesn’t exist, it’s the completely off-the-wall preposterousness of it. The feathers and bill are what made it not exist, not the lack of disprovability. The lack of disprovability is just what keeps the duck plausible enough for its believers. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

You’re right that the duck deity I conceptualize is wholly unlike the gods conceived by most theists, but my point was that because the duck was considerably more plausible than those gods, and I was comfortable saying with certainty that the duck didn’t exist, then it followed that I was comfortable saying the same thing about those gods.

I don’t know your basis for saying the duck is more plausible. If the problem is the bill and feathers, then maybe the bill and feathers don’t exist. The discussion on pages 27-28 I mentioned is relevant to that point. Flawed conceptions of God are common but don’t demonstrate that God is implausible.

A fairly mild and minimalist god, maybe your watchmaker-style god, is still, in my mind, more preposterous than the duck, even if the duck was blowing a party horn and wearing a fez. Clearly YMMV.

EDIT: Originally linked to the wrong Wikipedia article. What I mean by watchmaker is the God who set the universe in motion and then just walked away, leaving it to its own devices.

I tend to agree with this comparison and had in mind [believers] of that kind of deity as not included in my reference to “most theists” who recognize a deity based on their own perceptions. A God that is not present is like your imaginary duck. That’s not what most theists see as God.

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

Sure, atheists view things differently, but the kind of duck deity you conceptualize is wholly unlike God conceived by most theists.

The duck was created with the following criteria: no matter how preposterous the rest of it was, it must not be disprovable. So not wholly unlike – your modern gods were created with the same overriding criteria.

That something can’t be disproven or fully understand doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Science proceeds on all manner of theories that can’t be disproven.

Ah, that’s the point of contention, and it’s based on a misunderstanding of the duck post. It’s not the lack of disprovability that means it doesn’t exist, it’s the completely off-the-wall preposterousness of it. The feathers and bill are what made it not exist, not the lack of disprovability. The lack of disprovability is just what keeps the duck plausible enough for its believers. It doesn’t mean anything to me.

You’re right that the duck deity I conceptualize is wholly unlike the gods conceived by most theists, but my point was that because the duck was considerably more plausible than those gods, and I was comfortable saying with certainty that the duck didn’t exist, then it followed that I was comfortable saying the same thing about those gods.

I don’t know your basis for saying the duck is more plausible. If the problem is the bill and feathers, then maybe the bill and feathers don’t exist. The discussion on pages 27-28 I mentioned is relevant to that point. Flawed conceptions of God are common but don’t demonstrate that God is implausible.

paja is a niche guy.

Dek Rollins said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

The only connection I can find (after a single cursory Google search) between V and Speed Racer is that V was directed by the assistant director of the Matrix so… what’s your point? Am I missing something?

V was written by the Wutchumucallitskies.

How sexist 🙀

CatBus said:

Mrebo said:

CatBus, the problem with your imaginary duck hypothetical is that it relates to nothing. If theists viewed God in that way it would be just as nonsensical.

The duck was a man-made invention that was purpose-built to be an entity that can neither be disproven nor fully understood. So in that sense it’s exactly like gods – the fact that theists and atheists view such things differently was the point. The feathers were added to highlight the implausibility angle.

Sure, atheists view things differently, but the kind of duck deity you conceptualize is wholly unlike God conceived by most theists.

That something can’t be disproven or fully understand doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Science proceeds on all manner of theories that can’t be disproven.

Two books come to mind which I can’t distill very well without more time and thought. First, in “Reality and Identity” by Emile Meyerson (available as scanned on archive.org), there is a good exploration of provability and questions about the foundations of scientific understanding. If you’re super interested/motivated, pages 27-28 get to what I have in mind.

In passing, free will is mentioned. Free will is a concept that seems the go-to junction of science and religion. So far there is no resolution of the question whether free will exists.

Which brings me to the second book, “The Measure of Man,” by Joseph Wood Krutch. The gist is similar to the aforementioned pages by Meyerson, but focused on free will. Basically, whatever science might possibly explain, it can’t foreclose the existence of free will, though science tries. For Krutch’s purposes the existence of a God is neither here nor there.

Maybe free will is like an imaginary invisible duck, but I don’t think so.

I see the same relation in those debates to the debate over whether God exists. And if free will exists, we might ask pesky questions like where does it come from.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Reading obits and seeing the phrase “wife of 73 years.” I hope I find that kind of devotion some day.

And the longevity.

CatBus, the problem with your imaginary duck hypothetical is that it relates to nothing. If theists viewed God in that way it would be just as nonsensical.

Most theists believe in God based on what they can perceive and find it implausible that a deity doesn’t exist based on those perceptions. There are very flawed conceptions of God and I agree with Frink, at least to an extent, that really understanding God is beyond our capacity. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a basic (and necessarily flawed) understanding that does us some good.

I think we know what this means.

chyron8472 said:

Mrebo said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

I saw a lyric book that censored asshole as “assh*le”, but the “ass” part is the bad part, right? Why was the “hole” censored instead of that?

I think it’s the same reason microbikinis and speedo bathing suits are considered acceptable beach attire but some people.

by some people.

Think it through: tiny bathing suits cover just certain specific parts while leaving the bulk on display.

suspiciouscoffee said:

I saw a lyric book that censored asshole as “assh*le”, but the “ass” part is the bad part, right? Why was the “hole” censored instead of that?

I think it’s the same reason microbikinis and speedo bathing suits are considered acceptable beach attire but some people.