Falsifying Data Is Rampant Across Industries

[platypus]

We agree (and I would struggle to imagine someone who didn't agree) that if you just gave an isolated group with no knowledge of the outside world, the Bible (or any religious text) that they would interpret and use it differently from the modern world.

A rather large portion of Baptists/non-denominationals in my hometown.

In high school I was a Catholic kid on a speech and debate team composed mainly of fundamentalist Protestants. Very, very intelligent kids when it came to any subject besides religion. But many of them sincerely believed that the Bible was so completely self-explanatory that you could hand it to a savage and he'd figure out the teaching and practice of the Southern Baptist Convention in one read.

I could point out the confusion and heresy that characterized the early church and they'd say, "Those people knew their teachings were unbiblical."

You could write this off as them being idiotic high schoolers, but they were getting those ideas from somewhere.

I grew to realize why so many nonbelievers in the US think Christianity is the dumbest thing ever.

[Pawn]

A rather large portion of Baptists/non-denominationals in my hometown.

In high school I was a Catholic kid on a speech and debate team composed mainly of fundamentalist Protestants. Very, very intelligent kids when it came to any subject besides religion. But many of them sincerely believed that the Bible was so completely self-explanatory that you could hand it to a savage and he'd figure out the teaching and practice of the Southern Baptist Convention in one read.

I could point out the confusion and heresy that characterized the early church and they'd say, "Those people knew their teachings were unbiblical."

You could write this off as them being idiotic high schoolers, but they were getting those ideas from somewhere.

I grew to realize why so many nonbelievers in the US think Christianity is the dumbest thing ever.

I would ask them the hypothetical is an open way (non-attacky) to actually gauge if they believe religion is context sensitive.

I doubt you would get much friction... they may say "they are doing it wrong" or "thats not blah blah blah", but both of those statements are acknowledgements that the belief set and structure is context sensitive.

[Ericsquats]

This is off-topic, but what the hell. I've always wondered about people who reflexively utter this phrase verbatem (with the occasional "what your REALLY think" added) in response to a stated opinion. Are you prompted to do so by the opinion itself, or by the perceived audacity of the expression of the opinion? Are you so uncomfortable with a confidently expressed opinion that you drag up this tired retort because you can't think of anything else to say, yet feel the need to say something even though the opinion itself is outside your scope? Being opinionated myself, I have been subjected to this countless times since I was a child, and I am always confused about it. I wonder where it was first used, if some public school teacher decided to promulgate its use, or if it first appeared in a movie I have't seen. Really, no shit: why do people say this????

Late to the party but I think this sums up how you feel Rip: YouTube

[Scaldrew]

Crom smash

I think I already said, in apparently too many words, that correlation is not causation. More than not effecting the "kind and loving society" (only in your mind, btw; people in real life suck dicks in a bad way and for free), I dare say that Christianity actively opposed the evolution into modern day society since the very beginning. Sticking to what I know in picking this non-random random example, blasphemy was illegal in Europe for the majority of modern times. Authors in the 19th century could have their newly received copyrights evoked if they were suspected of including even a hint of blasphemy in their texts. Being an atheist, mind you, is still a big stigma in the US, even after the 10 to 15 years of active campaigning for this to be alleviated. And the only reason people aren't burning people at the stake anymore is because of the effects of modernity that have rendered many people inert, that is to say exhausted to self-organise, or in many other ways incapable of carrying out barbaric shit like that. Having (riot) police with big, scary weaponry that can stop you dead in your tracks, quite literally, will do that. Yes, if these things were not the way they are, people would continue to do barbaric things, regardless of how lovely you think Christianity is.

Other than that, I don't believe I need to point to the Islamic countries where this type of barbarism is still being carried out. Oh, but I guess there aren't any literal transcriptions of calling for the death and murder of anyone in Christianity, is there? It's not like the first commandment is to not take "the lord's name" in vain. Except that it is, and my bias as a man of texts before anything allows me to see that. Wanna know what else most of the non-Christian countries all have in common besides being horribly godless? World War 2, a seemingly literal battle of the figurative gods, in retrospect. Wasn't really that big a deal, but it may seem significant to want to be tolerant of others after having ground the civilised west into nothing over the course of just a few years after acting on the contrary principle in a mechanised, industrialised way. Oh, but the Russians and they were in the war! Isn't it also very very strange that they replaced Christianity as the state religion to literal idol worship in the form of revering the dear leader? I wonder where they got that idea.

I disagree, agree. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Disagreed. Do we agree (sure) We both have agreed.

I was responding to the idea that the Christian societies are the best societies because they were based on Christianity or "judeo christian values", like beating people on the sabbath for working and people being swallowed in whales. The whole shpiel in my argument is that, no, there is no such thing as objective morality derived from Christianity. Instead, people of any given time and place look for the best things in other things, when left to their own devices. Once you disconnect "what does it mean, lord?" from "I wanna go to heaven and eat rice pudding with a golden spoon", you get a whole range of vastly different interpretations, ultimately all nice-looking, benign, and even benevolent pictures of what Christianity "is". This is why you get religiously motivated charities that are just helping people because they feel it's the right thing to do; before, you got missionaries that helped people and then blackmailed them into becoming part of a pulpit, which really seems more like a trade to me.

But, like I also say, because this style of contemporary hermeneutics is lost on people in name only, you get very adamant argumentation about what Christianity absolutely is, objectively. Because, well, how could it not be this way? It's in the texts, isn't it? Except all the ugly stuff is also still there, which, again, people like to forget about. And once you write down or give structure to your argument in this way, it becomes more and more impossible to justify, leaving the faithful to just conclude "well, it's just faith". And "if you base morality on science, you get eugenics", but I really don't feel like arguing against those positions seeing as the first one renders religion completely unfalsifiable, thus boring, and the second one has been argued to death already, thus also boring. I hate to be the one to have to break it to Crom, but if the Twilight books were considered religious texts (as, indeed, they are by many teenaged girls, no doubt), you'd get religious effigies of tweeny vampire dunces who only drink animal blood and fall in love with uncharismatic teenaged girls with nothing to offer. And if left to their own devices, they would drive stakes through the hearts of blasphemous unbelievers if they had the power to turn it into legal punishment.

Gentlemen, we don't need to do the experiment any longer; we already have. Moving on from the experiment is what got us the nice things about religion. Oh, and I cannot take for one moment the silly point seriously that Christian societies ended slavery. Sure, they did! Took them long enough, too! Sorry for any slaves born before that time somewhere in the mid to late 1800s, you know, the apex of the industrialised age in Europe and the US. Historic detail, I'm sure. Sorry, slaves! The New Testament and gentle Jesus, meek and mild, himself, weren't enough to save you until supposedly 1800 years after they came to save mankind. Oops! And no, industrialisation didn't lead to a more social society; social awareness of ungodly working and living conditions did. Demands for proper legal representation and some form of legal equity did. This just in anticipation of the argument that China is very industrialised, but has people working in sweat shops, which is a non-argument.

[George Christiansen]

Dear George,

Thank you for your reply but you didn’t address any of my examples. You insist science can only support an ethics of cheating and gene spreading. But medicine is a science is it not and it is not neutral between poison and medicine. Economics is a science is it not and it’s not neutral on what types of society promote the greatest levels of prosperity at all income levels. Psychology is a science and it’s not neutral between ethics that promote authoritarian submission and those that promote the value of rationality and deliberation on measures of psychological well being.

A better way to phrase what I mean to say is that science can only tell you, at least in a purely materialistic sense, what will make you happy. It cannot provide any reason by which you should leave any means off the table except those that will actually interfere with that happiness. It doesn't provide you with what is good, but what is useful. The ethics and preferences you already bring to the scientific conclusions will decide which of the tools that science provides.

Those sciences STARTED with those presumptions you claim that they gave. Cures were seen as good before we had the medicine to provide them. Prosperity was seen as good before economics tried to demonstrate how to provide it best. Insanity was seen as bad before we had a single label for mental disorders. None of those values were decided upon by those sciences.

Science, when it works, can only say "Here is what we got and this is what it does if you use it thusly.". What is actually a good or evil use of the discovery is decided via another means.

Finally, to address your examples—I’ve yet to meet or read of a sociopath or cheater that measured high for well being. They usually end up dead, imprisoned or condemned to superficial relationships. When I think of people who exude high levels of well being I don’t think of Nixon, Madoff, Ted Bundy, Anthony Weiner, and their ilk. Please feel free to provide me with any examples of people that are lifelong cheaters and/or sociopaths who are also thriving psychologically.

Well you generally only read about "caught" sociopaths. So there's that.

For starters, the sociopath is thriving psychologically because he or she is actually much left in conflict in the way that us normals are torn in that we may want the benefits/pleasures of doing something we believe is wrong, but actually feel guilt, even when not caught. Inner conflict is a huge part of psychosis. Sociopaths lack this.

Secondly, you and I will die in the end, but many of the "successful" sociopaths still spent their time doing the equivalent of snorting coke of hookers (nothing against either in particular though) until they get caught and would like laugh at our obscure quiet lives spent trying to be decent. A an example, Gaddafi certainly got killed, but do you think he'd have traded his life as a king with being a decent human with none of the power he had over the life that being the monster he was gave him?

And to be clear, I am not saying that religion, philosophy, or politics gives us objective morals with the level of certainty that say engineering gives us with load bearing abilities. I am simply saying that, as unable to provide certainty as those fields may be, they are the field that deal with providing a framework for ethics. Religion, philosophy, or politics may do a shitty job of providing ethics, but science doesn't even do a crappy job.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Religion, philosophy, or politics may do a shitty job of providing ethics, but science doesn't even do a crappy job.

This is a pretty thoroughly straw-like man, George. Who has suggested that we depend on Science for ethics?

[AndrewLewis]

Religion, philosophy, or politics may do a shitty job of providing ethics, but science doesn't even do a crappy job.

Maybe that's because science can't be used for ethics. Science cannot be used to determine what SHOULD be done, only what CAN be done. It's a tool of determination. That's it. Science is entirely amoral.

[Pawn]

Maybe you missed the bit or disagree on the bit where religion or illogical belief sets have an evolutionary advantage and therefore a genetic component.

I think I already said, in apparently too many words, that correlation is not causation.

You use correlation to assume causation when you say 'Christianity is bad' also in the grand scheme (as previously stated) it doesn't matter in this discussion. The objectively best societies have Christian roots.

Being an atheist, mind you, is still a big stigma in the US, even after the 10 to 15 years of active campaigning for this to be alleviated.

Interesting how in many non-Christian countries is active discrimination, denial of rights, and in much of the middle east the punishment for atheism is death... weird how that is. Isn't it awesome that there are a bunch of countries that developed systems that protect your rights... I wonder what commonalities can be drawn from these nations which try to protect rights of the individual?

Other than that, I don't believe I need to point to the Islamic countries where this type of barbarism is still being carried out. Oh, but I guess there aren't any literal transcriptions of calling for the death and murder of anyone in Christianity, is there?

When was the last time someone was executed in the United States or Canada or Great Britian or Western Europe for blasphemy?

Oh, but the Russians and they were in the war! Isn't it also very very strange that they replaced Christianity as the state religion to literal idol worship in the form of revering the dear leader? I wonder where they got that idea.

This makes the case for continuing the use of successful belief sets. Reject it at the national level and fuck up your country. Same thing happened in China and Cambodia.

Except all the ugly stuff is also still there, which, again, people like to forget about.

Nobody is ignoring or forgetting about anything in a book. The practice and evolution of belief set is in question.

And once you write down or give structure to your argument in this way, it becomes more and more impossible to justify, leaving the faithful to just conclude "well, it's just faith". And "if you base morality on science, you get eugenics"

No I'm framing the argument this way because I need everyone to acknowledge the objective facts of the scenario (or show where the flaw is).
1. Humans evolved with irrational beliefs.
2. The most successful irrational belief set is modern Christianity.

Once we have a solid choice for starting belief set we can start looking at how to modify or change it to improve society. Other atheists seem to be obsessed with 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' when it comes to Christianity. (they then also tend to clam up when discussing other religions or beliefs)

There is a working system that is available and we should gradually change it to continue to improve society... why start from scratch? We've also seen things go very sideways in your example (Russia) when somebody arbitrarily creates a new belief set.

Oh, and I cannot take for one moment the silly point seriously that Christian societies ended slavery. Sure, they did! Took them long enough, too!

The ignorance here bugs me.

First, slavery is a natural step in the progression of morality. Before slavery you KILLED all whom you defeated. Slavery was a method of limiting violence and allowed societies to progress and intermingle.
Second, all religions and belief sets had the opportunity to stop slavery. Only one did. One. It wasn't a polytheistic religion, it wasn't Judaism, and it wasn't Islam.

[shanewilcox]

This is a pretty thoroughly straw-like man, George.

To wit:

A better way to phrase what I mean to say is that science can only tell you, at least in a purely materialistic sense, what will make you happy. It cannot provide any reason by which you should leave any means off the table except those that will actually interfere with that happiness. It doesn't provide you with what is good, but what is useful. The ethics and preferences you already bring to the scientific conclusions will decide which of the tools that science provides.

Science can only tell me what will make me happy?! I shoulda paid more attention.

To broaden the field of ethics slightly, we might define it, to borrow the phrasing of Sam Harris, as the pursuit of the well-being of conscious creatures. While it is certainly arguable that this concern does not arise directly from science, it seems clear that we can best (most usefully, even) approach the terms of this concern in a non-question-begging sense from the perspective of science. From the perspective of organized religion, a conscious creature is one capable of believing religious precepts, and that creature's well-being is directly proportional to the strength of its belief, as manifest in behaviours deemed (by the appropriate authority) to be in accordance with those precepts.

The most useful and compelling descriptions of both consciousness and well-being come from various intersections between the neuro-, psychological, cognitive and computational sciences and philosophy of mind. Any ethics worthy of the name must take some account of the findings being generated by this work if it is to have any hope of relevance. Religion may have been our first best shot at a dimly-perceived target, and it remains a repository of the mythological structures of our personal and social organization, but as such, it too must be approached scientifically if it is to have any meaningful effect on our ethics.

[cnorthern]

This is a pretty thoroughly straw-like man, George. Who has suggested that we depend on Science for ethics?

Sam Harris has suggested it. And he makes some pretty convincing points doing it, too. The Moral Landscape, if you have some time, is an excellent, although sometimes very dry read.

The Moral Landscape - Google Search