thedistillers wrote:First I hope I'm welcomed here. I was banned from RD forum, and was informed that legal action would be taken against me if I would try to register again. All I did was challenging the positivist Calilasseia and her (or his?) vacuous slogans (e.g. If an entity X is postulated to exist, and there exists in turn no substantive evidence supporting the existence of entity X, then the default position is to regard entity x as non-existent until said substantive evidence materialises. ).
I would like to have a respectful dialogue with non-Christians, and challenge their worldview.
Here's a starter:
- Humans have a sensus divinitatis, which allow them to know that the proposition "God exists" is true,without any empirical evidence needed. Those who deny that the proposition "God exists" is true purposely reject the spirit in their wickedness.
Discuss.
1) Positivism is a perfectly valid logical construct, they use it in courts, if you remember, innocent until proven guilty and all that.
2)The default position he advocates, in the absence of evidence, is the right one because no evidence allows an infinite number of possibilities to be true.
3)Respectful dialogue with non-Christians? You do realize that there are loads of non-christians who are theists, who don't subscribe to your version of mythology...
4)All organisms have instincts, so bloody what?
5) "Purposely reject the spirit in their wickedness" , unverified bullshit of a noxious variety, there are so many blind assertions in there, you aren't going to impress anyone with mental gymnastics with that degree of mental con(dis?)tortion.
6)Finally, your proposed construct may have a biological basis, namely , brain damage...
The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that neural activation of a large fronto-parieto-temporal network may underpin a variety of spiritual experiences, information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking. Combining pre- and post-neurosurgery personality assessment with advanced brain-lesion mapping techniques, we found that selective damage to left and right inferior posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase of self-transcendence. Therefore, modifications of neural activity in temporoparietal areas may induce unusually fast modulations of a stable personality trait related to transcendental self-referential awareness. These results hint at the active, crucial role of left and right parietal systems in determining self-transcendence and cast new light on the neurobiological bases of altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors in neurological and mental disorders. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
That abstract is from
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2015 ... dinalpos=1
There is also evidence that the perceived need to postulate mythological entities for the purposes of genuflectory tendencies is associated with egocentrism...
People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.
The full research paper is available here at
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/ ... l.pdf+html
Welcome to the forum, btw
