psychology has shown over and over that personal experience can be mistaken. Optical illusions are a small but notable example. Creation of false memories is another. There are many other examples of how our perceptions and subjective experiences may fool us. Personal experience and personal belief is definitely not enough criteria for something to be considered truth. I do think, though, that for a broader truth, one should consider all sides critically, including his personal experience, published scientific reports, opinions of others, etc etc, giving each part its deserved value in the specific context and situation.

and no, sorry, your argument makes no sense about making the experiments yourself. Are you going to make the inspection on an airplane yourself before you fly, or are you gonna trust the engineers?

Im amazed! You really cant see the huge distinction between believing a bearded angry male in the sky sending lightning bolts to those that dont pray on sunday or giving up your house and quitting your job because you believe 2012 will enlighten all people, and trusting a peer-reviewed (meaning collectively examined by a group of certified experts on the subject) article on, say, the mechanics of an airplane?!

Rationalize all you want, ya, Im done with this conversation. Just know that equating those two things as if they are equivalent is VERY dangerous and can lead to disastrous consequences.

I've said it before and ill say it again - i believe proof when it is sound. I believe (cause i am not equipped to do the experiments myself) a group of people who are trained to catch pretenders and have condoned the work of another, KNOWING that the work is not infallible and CAN be proved wrong. A belief, or a leap of faith, is not subject to infallibility.

i.e. you cannot DISPROVE the existence of god. So it is a belief. Science is built on disproving (wholly or partially) other's research. It discards faulty arguments and admits new ones. No belief system, or religion, does this. So to call science a religion is fundamentally erroneous. BTW, i am not saying he/she/it doesn't exist. Merely pointing out that, by strict definition, it will never be FACT.

Your example is faulty. No one engineer can guarantee all of what you assert. safety is not a fact. it is an opinion. A more correct analogy would be to assert that if all things function correctly, the plane WILL fly. And you can't really argue with that. And I have seen enough planes fly to trust this assertion, and don't need to verify every plane on the face of the earth. It is repeatable - another major part of the scientific method. beliefs are not founded on anything verifiable, repeatable or founded on anything subject to infallibility.

So saying god exists is no more provable, or disprovable (and thus just as admissible logically), than the assertions that blacks are inferior, that your soul exists and transmigrates, that jews were responsible for the decline of germany in the 20's and thus deserved to be gassed, and that stones are conscious, for that matter.

So while I generally respect peoples beliefs, I am no fool. They can be very dangerous. As of course, can the use of scientific discoveries. But the discoveries themselves are not dangerous, their applications are. Beliefs, I believe can be dangerous in and of themselves:

If everyone believed that nothing written was believable (or trustable - a better word) and refused to teach their children to read to spare them all the lies, what kind of a world would we live in?

Think before making radical assertions. That's not science, just common sense.

JBArk

Better does not equal practical or necessary - we live in the real world.

JBArk

P.S. for the rest, see my post above

BTW i am not a scientist, but a creative filmmaker who questions everything, but accepts what i cannot understand.

In the same way that scientific discoveries themselves are not dangerous, beliefs are not dangerous. It is only when beliefs lead to action that bad things can happen. A belief not acted on is as impotent as no belief at all.

yes, a fine line. But belief systems are CREATED to lead to and encourage certain behaviour and action. The scientific method was created to examine these beliefs:

Beliefs run deep: what you believe affects where you are, who you are, where you go, what you eat, how you spend your time, who you love, who you hate, what you do to those you love and hate, what you teach your children (if only by example)... No scientific discovery or objectively observed phenomena (or its subjective interpretation thereof) leads to immediate change or action. Until it becomes belief. That's when science is dangerous: when those who espouse it forget that it is not a system of belief, but an instrument of logical proof and forget that it IS subject to fallibility.

Science is by nature humble: it admits its errors and builds other models. Religion is arrogant: it admits no errors and creates unproveable and unchallengeable propositions and stagnates in its own foetid mess.

To put it even more bluntly, science is an instrument of long-term profound change and progression by virtue of its tenets' disprove-ability and its admission of fallibilty, whereas religion is for short term immediate change and, frankly, the status quo - being institutions that are unwavering in their exclusion of new ideas and the notion of evolution and change.


The mechanisms are different in my opinion, but I understand your point.

I generalize here, but far less than the generalizations propounded by others above (and likely below. As above, so below - finally understood this aphorism! )

JBArk

Some of them ARE facts ya. the way facts are defined anyway. If not, you would have a different compound (or none at all, or an explosion, or you'd transmute into a lion....) every time you extracted from MHRB.

Surely you can see this? That MHRB contains DMT is a fact. And it is soluble in a non-polar solvent. That is a FACT. And is thus reliable and repeatable and scientific.

Why the derision for facts when you run your life by them?

Facts exist. denying this is insanity. And, I repeat - DANGEROUS.

JBArk

We agree entirely (on this point)! Finally!

i still maintain that beliefs that carry with them the humility to be proven wrong are more valid than those that rest on unprovable and un-disprovable dogma.



It is a theory, incidently, and no one claims it is fact. it is known as the copenhagen INTERPRETATION, not the copenhagen truth.

JBArk

EDIT: and you didn't answer my questions!

The thing is that these facts, or beliefs as you claim them to be, can easily be proven again and again by others. You have one individual observing a phenomenon, he tells his friend about it and his friend gets curious. His friend goes out there and does the same observation, and then he tells all his friends and they do the very same - they go out there and test it. And then we have lots of people out there that have done pretty much the same observations. And that's why we accept them, because we can go out there ourselves and test it. If you did go out there and test it for yourself and make the same observation, is it then a belief? I don't see where you're trying to get at with this.

Well sure, but so what? This just seems pointless to me, I'm sorry to say.

so you accept nothing as fact that you haven't verified yourself?

ever been to africa? India? mexico? If not how do you know they exist? Is the existence of africa a fact only if you have been there? And only if you have scrutinized every square inch of the continent?

i both believe Africa exists and have enough surrounding evidence that i feel i can say with authority that it exists as a fact without having to visit ever corner and every square inch.

you can call it a belief, but then we get into that philosophical quagmire of not being able to assert the reality or the factual existence of anything, and we're back to square one.

I submit, for simplicity's sake, that we admit that everything is a belief by virtue of it being filtered from our senses through our CNS (a copout stance, but simple enough), and within this domain there is a subset called "facts" that we believe because we or others can attest to their veracity and have subjected them to rigorous proofs. A subset which is distinct from "belief as faith". Call it "belief as fact" if its easier.

cheers,

JBArk

But there is a fundemental difference. How can you not see that? Science and religion is NOT the same thing! Do I seriously have to go through this step by step? Science is biased on objective observations about natural phenomena in the material universe, how can this be anything close to religion as you seem to propose it is? Religion isn't even concerned about answering stuff like this. Would you ask a scientist or a religious man the following questions: "Why is there volcanic eruptions?". Or perhaps "What is the genetic code?", or "What basic elements is life composed of?" etc. And beliefs are not the same as facts for christ sakes..

so you accept nothing as fact that you haven't verified yourself?

ever been to africa? India? mexico? If not how do you know they exist? Is the existence of africa a fact only if you have been there? And only if you have scrutinized every square inch of the continent?

i both believe Africa exists and have enough surrounding evidence that i feel i can say with authority that it exists as a fact without having to visit ever corner and every square inch.

you can call it a belief, but then we get into that philosophical quagmire of not being able to assert the reality or the factual existence of anything, and we're back to square one.

I submit, for simplicity's sake, that we admit that everything is a belief by virtue of it being filtered from our senses through our CNS (a copout stance, perhaps, but simple enough), and within this domain there is a subset called "facts" that we believe because we or others can attest to their veracity and have subjected them to rigorous proofs. A subset which is distinct from "belief as faith", which is basically everything else, from inspiring spiritual experiences to crackpot end of the world theories.

Call it "belief as fact" if its easier.

cheers,

JBArk

Fair enough, but please consider this...

If there is no reason, then why do you get worked up at all?

If discussing things which include ideas that are outside your reality tunnel is upsetting your inner balance, and causing you distress, ask yourself why this is so. Because it has nothing to do with anyone else, it only has to do with you.

If your need to be right is so strong that you lash out in anger toward others who do not believe as you do, then this is providing you an excellent opportunity for personal growth. If your need to be right is stronger than your desire for the truth, then you will never find that which you seek.

What about Buddhist beliefs? They are founded on verifiable, repeeatable experiences. They have been reproduced by tens of thousands of not far far more individuals over thousands of years. They are subject to infallability, but just as much so as an equal number scientists coming to the same conclusion about an experiement.



Yes, but that is a belief SYSTEM, which is not the same as a belief. As said, beliefs in themselves are value neutral, it is when the get acted upon, or organized where they attain the value of "good" or "bad".

This would be true if we lived in a perfect world, in which we do not. Science by nature is humble, but you forget science is practiced by human beings, which may or may not be humble. Burnt is an excellent example of science not being humble, but instead being arrogant.

Science is slow to admit errors, though over time erroneous beliefs will be righted through continued evidence and experimentation. There is a status quo in science as well which is reluctant to change. Again because we are working with human beings, no one likes to see their life's work destroyed in an instant by some new discovery. I can understand it, but I do not condone it. The guardians of the status quo oftgen exclude anything that is too far out from the mainstream, even if there is good evidence for such...they stick to paradigms even when there is substantial observational evidence which calls those paradigms into question.

Some religions are as you describe, but not all of them.

Saidan - knew youd show up here sooner or later!

I need you to be more specific - are you refering to the belief in the tibetan book of the dead that death mAy be averted by making a small effigy of oneself, poking holes in it and filling them with bits of your own skin hair and blood and defecating on it before burying it near a stream?

Or perhaps the pan-buddhist assertion in the cycle of life, reincarnation and the ultimate attainment after death of buddahood/enlightenment? If this has been verifiable by objective repeatable means, please, educate me!

Or provide specific examples with attendant proofs that i can accept or refute. And please no empirical "ginseng proofs" : i.e. Millions of chinese for thousands of years can't be wrong. If that were the case the issue of gods existence would have been settled eons ago.

JBArk

Would you ask a scientist or a religious man the following questions: "What are morals?" "What are values whether economic, aesthetic or moral?" "What is the meaning of life or its purpose?"

There is not one route to everything, and science and religion are not incompatible, they just answer different questions.

And this is exactly the point I was trying to make, saying that science and religion is NOT the same thing, and that religion is not concerned with answering the same questions as science is and vice versa (or so it ought to be). Read my post again.