The gulf between us

[bobhikes]

No one said anything about "right and wrong", which is, I think, where you're getting hung up. A completely logical perspective on anything need not consider "right and wrong", only what is or will be, and what is not or will not be.

So, take for instance, your claim that "Interpreting the emotional response of others requires empathy which utilizes your emotions to feel others emotions." I don't have to understand or even contemplate someone else's feelings to have the knowledge that if I hurt someone close to them, they may lash out at me. All this knowledge would require is an examination or witnessing of past events in which those bereaved or closest to the assailed sought vengeance, recompense or "justice". Something that happens all the time.

In thinking on pure logic alone, one would not need to "prove" that "theft is wrong" or "killing is wrong." I'm not even sure how you think that plays into any part of it. All you need know is the potential outcomes of your actions. You then take the action if the outcome is deemed worth the risk of possible detrimental consequences. Consequences that WILL BE FOISTED UPON YOU REGARDLESS YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THEM.

Consider this line of thought: "If I steal this, I may be caught. If I am caught, I could go to prison, based on the consequences those around me believe I should be bound by. Is this object worth stealing in my estimation?"

Here, the thinker contemplates the consequences, but not necessarily because he agrees with them or feels anything at all about them - only because he knows them to be a factor/possibility/etc.

Fine I don't need wrong. If you lash out at someone and they cower, or they lash back, or they ignore you people don't react emotionally the same. Emotional response depends on emotions of the day plus what you do. Without being able to determine this you would not be able to interpret the response properly. Logically it would not compute.

I am not saying you would not weigh the consequences and experiences around you. I am not saying you would steal. I am saying is that stealing would be a viable option and you would weigh it each and every time. Stealing would not invoke an emotional response but just be another possible solution.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

Fine I don't need wrong. If you lash out at someone and they cower, or they lash back, or they ignore you people don't react emotionally the same. Emotional response depends on emotions of the day plus what you do. Without being able to determine this you would not be able to interpret the response properly. Logically it would not compute.

I agree with you here. However, none of that would matter to the logical mind anyway... they would simply re-assess as conditions changed and make new, viable decisions based on the variables at hand.

I am not saying you would not weigh the consequences and experiences around you. I am not saying you would steal. I am saying is that stealing would be a viable option and you would weigh it each and every time. Stealing would not invoke an emotional response but just be another possible solution.

I agree with this. A purely logically functioning mind would only weigh the viability of the option presented by "stealing." That's all, no emotional response is required.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I am finding that I cannot communicate with theists here, the same pattern I have experienced elsewhere. We are simply so different that discussion is all but impossible. What am i doing wrong? Logic does not move these people, I have no other way of thinking. So we are at an impasse. How can I talk to these people in terms they will understand? It is frustrating because I wish to understand religious belief and religious people, if I am to judge religion and religious belief fairly and to treat religious believers less contemptuously and dismissively. As I have been tasked to do by RL persons.

You probably realize that faith based thought is radically different from reason and evidence based thought, which you seem to esteem. They cannot reach you with faith based assertions that cannot be demonstrated or effectively argued, and you cannot reach them with your evidence and reasoning.

I just wrote an email to a conservative Christian acquaintance on this topic this morning. The subject was his still having confidence in Trump, but the argument is the same as with any faith based position, and I believe relevant to your question:

You're an attorney. You understand that to convince others, you have to assemble and present all of the relevant evidence and evaluate it critically and open-mindedly, which means impartially, with an understanding of what constitutes sound reasoning and what is fallacy, and with a willingness to be convinced by a compelling argument wherever it leads and however undesirable the conclusion may seem. This conclusion should be tentative, that is, not considered certain, and amenable to additional evidence that reinforces or contradicts the initial conclusion. Where possible, one considers what else might or must be true if the conclusion is valid or in error, and seeks additional evidence to confirm or disconfirm one's initial position. This leads to justified belief.

There's an altogether different way of thinking wherein one begins by believing what one wants to be true, or that which one has been indoctrinated to believe. This idea is treated like a conclusion, but is actually an unsupported premise. I call it a pseudo-conclusion. Evidence and reason were not part of the process. This kind of thinking is generally accompanied by a confirmation bias that sifts through evidence, keeping and emphasizing that which appears to support the pseudo-conclusion, and ignoring or downplaying that which contradicts it. Often, that evidence is retrofitted into a specious argument. It is presented as leading to the pseudo-conclusion.

We see this a lot with religious apologetics, and I'm going to suggest that that is also what we are seeing here with Trumpian apologetics. The believer will sift through Genesis, for example, and pick out whatever scriptures seem to support his faith based belief that the words are of divine origin. This may be limited to just the idea that the universe had a beginning, or that fish existed before birds, or that the beasts existed before man. This is then presented as evidence that the bible contains information that must have come from a supernatural source, since no man could have known those things then. Forget all of the errors in the scripture, such as a firmament separating the waters above from those below. They are not part of the argument. If asked about them, they will be called allegory.

If one allows himself to think like that, he can believe anything or its polar opposite just as easily, and cherry pick the parts that seem to support him, which would probably be the parts he rejected if he had chosen to believe the opposite instead. Such people can no longer be reached with evidence or argument.​

I believe that that is the phenomenon you are encountering and finding frustrating.

If so, the remedy is to recognize that fact, and modify your expectations accordingly. You and others can still benefit from your posts to such people, but they will not. They will not be fazed.

Maybe this will help as well: The moderator in the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on whether creationism is a viable scientific field of study asked, "What would change your minds?"

Scientist Bill Nye answered, "Evidence."

Young Earth Creationist Ken Ham answered, "Nothing. I'm a Christian."

That's it in a nutshell.

 

[bobhikes]

I agree with you here. However, none of that would matter to the logical mind anyway... they would simply re-assess as conditions changed and make new, viable decisions based on the variables at hand.

However without emotional empathy(data) they would lack the data necessary to make a viable decision. Emotional response makes up at least 50% of our lives without that data whatever you consider logical would never be right. It may be logical but its like the logic that the sun rotated around the earth only harder to disprove.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

However without emotional empathy(data) they would lack the data necessary to make a viable decision. Emotional response makes up at least 50% of our lives without that data whatever you consider logical would never be right. It may be logical but its like the logic that the sun rotated around the earth only harder to disprove.

The truly logical mind wouldn't play by any rule-book, whether spoken or unspoken. So, in the example you gave where someone turns on you violently and unexpectedly due to an emotional response, the logical mind would simply look for the quickest route to put that person down. The decision, at the point is inherently "viable", it would only be the means which were up for debate. Emotion may have helped someone from getting into the situation in the first place, but at any moment, the purely logical mind would only ever be searching for the next "best" move, regardless the circumstances.

 

[bobhikes]

The truly logical mind wouldn't play by any rule-book, whether spoken or unspoken. So, in the example you gave where someone turns on you violently and unexpectedly due to an emotional response, the logical mind would simply look for the quickest route to put that person down. The decision, at the point is inherently "viable", it would only be the means which were up for debate. Emotion may have helped someone from getting into the situation in the first place, but at any moment, the purely logical mind would only ever be searching for the next "best" move, regardless the circumstances.

Which makes my point a purely logical mind is as bad as a purely emotional mind. No rules would be of great danger to those around them.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

Which makes my point a purely logical mind is as bad as a purely emotional mind. No rules would be of great danger to those around them.

Not if the detriments to self, based on knowledge of imposed consequences, were enough to make actions incurring those consequences lose viability.

And again, I still don't see where you were trying to make that point about pure logic/pure emotion. Perhaps in responses to others?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Emotions are not good at all. They delude and confound people. Emotive people make terrible mistakes.

Assuming that by emotions that you are including feelings like satisfaction, passion, interest, and self-respect, then I disagree. These are the colors of the palette of conscious experience, without which, people often lose the will to live, depression being closer to anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) than sadness.

The role of reason is to control which colors one will experience as best we can - the pleasant and pretty ones, or the ugly and dissonant ones. We try to understand the world so that we can anticipate and insofar as possible, modify it to suit us. Returning to the art metaphor, reason is more like the perimeter of the patches of emotive color.

So yes, use reason to argue. But what's worth arguing about without feelings? An archetype of this from pop culture might be Spock and Kirk from Star Trek. Spock was usually depicted as pure reason without feeling or emotion. Kirk was passionate, but also reasonable and intelligent. Which existence is more appealing?

Emotion without reason is a rocky and tumultuous life full of frustration and regret. Reason without emotion is an empty life. The trick is to favorably modulate ones emotional state using effective reasoning.

From Wiki:

Plato paints the picture of a Charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses:

"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome."
​

The Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature (e.g., righteous indignation); while the other represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The Charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards enlightenment.​

 

[sun rise]

The problem with pure logic is that it rests on untestable assumptions. I once had a discussion with a Christian who believed that the findings of science were accurate for the laws of the universe we observe today. He did not believe in uniformitarianism. God, you see, had created the world just like the Bible says but then also changed the rules to make it seem like science was accurate as a test of faith. Since the rules the universe works on today includes uniformitarianism then there's no way to prove or disprove that the laws were the same throughout all time and space.

So when a scientist challenged him about some finding, he agreed that the finding appears accurate but that God had changed the rules of the game.

It's also useful to understand the formal limits of logic Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia

 

[bobhikes]

Not if the detriments to self, based on knowledge of imposed consequences, were enough to make actions incurring those consequences lose viability.

And again, I still don't see where you were trying to make that point about pure logic/pure emotion. Perhaps in responses to others?

Obviously after my first response the OP asked why I believe logic without emotion is as bad as emotion without logic. The op like you I guess believes logic is superior to emotion and we can do without emotion.

Personally I believe we need a combination of both (evolution seems to agree) and that a Person completely void of emotion or logic is an impossibility except maybe in some mentally distressed state.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

There is only one claim of atheism, God(s) do not exist. I support that claim with pure application of logic. Which follows as thus, pay attention. 1. There is no evidence of God(s) existing to disprove. 2. As there is no evidence of God(s) to disprove I have no case to answer. You may as well ask me to disprove the existence of invisible elephants. For which there also is no evidence to disprove. Equally illogical.

I call myself an atheist, but do not claim that gods don't exist. How can I? Because I haven't found evidence for a god? That only rules out the existence of omnipotent, omniscient gods that want to be found, not gods like the deist god.

One does not need to disprove the existence or possibility of gods to be an atheist any more than he needs to disprove the existence of vampires or leprechauns to be an avampirist or aleprechaunist, and for the same reason: There is no test, measurement, observation, argument or algorithm that can rule any of them out, and to do so anyway constitutes a leap of faith that is neither justified nor necessary. One just simply lives as if none of them exist.

If the deist god exists, fine. If not, fine. too. I'll live the same way either way until given a compelling reason to do otherwise is uncovered. Likewise with vampires and leprechauns.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Atheism is a religion, obviously, and is based off irrational faith in the existence of a (non-deity.).

This is called the "atheist god".

• "I always flinch in embarrassment for the believer who trots out, 'Atheism is just another kind of faith,' because it's a tacit admission that taking claims on faith is a silly thing to do. When you've succumbed to arguing that the opposition is just as misguided as you are, it's time to take a step back and rethink your attitudes." - Amanda Marcotte

 

[Kemosloby]

I think, as a theist, it helps to consider religion as more like a theological fandom. Whether the (O)bject of fandom is real is rather beside the point: religion provides social, cultural, and other roots to ground people. Have you ever had the joy of watching Star Trek vs Star Wars debates? Same difference. None of it is real, but people can be weird. I think the lowest point of fandom was when it came out Captain America is having some Hydra issues and the creators of this OBVIOUSLY FAKE character got death threats from fans. I don't read the comics, but I have a hard time believing the thing people took away from squeaky clean Cap is "call for the deaths of people who drew a comic book".


Again, look at it as a fandom where the (O)bject of the fandom is irrelevant and I find it gets easier to understand.


God just deciding out of the blue to create the universe isn't randomness?


Even the Vulcans were revealed to be with emotion, despite their attempts to suppress it.


Yes, I have also realized that people who have never had this issue tend to have certain worldviews that don't match up to reality. I sympathize.


So would the gods of many belief systems, though.

For little else than some emotional "they irritated Me" kind of nonsense, as well.


Though there are certain spectrums where logic is more appreciated than emotion.

I, myself, obviously won't agree with Corvus as I'm a theist, but I appreciate Corvus' logic because everything should be based on it.


It's also illogical to assume technology will just want to kill everyone. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Why does Skynet want to kill all humans? We programmed it to, that's why. I'd come to the conclusion we deserve death too. However, even Skynet (or, rather, certain terminators) can learn we are not all just raging hawks bent on global destruction.


The Terminator franchise dealt with this issue in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
John Henry


Indeed. Having distaste is emotional, not logical.


Even Data, before the silly "emotion chip" thing, had obvious emotional reactions. True, nearly all sci-fi bots/AI I can think of are guilty of at least a little emotion, though it could be due to the fact they are all played by emotional humans who can't hide it 100%. Still ... it's there ....

Logic relies on knowledge, if you don't have the facts you can't answer everything with logic, therefore unless you or Corvus are all knowing your logic falls short. But It worked for Spock because it was a TV show and whatever the script writers determined was truth.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

We have faith in the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, which works well enough for people to post laughable inanity on here.

Yes, but note that this is a different definition of faith than what is meant by religious faith, which is unjustified belief. Faith in the scientific method is justified belief, which is obviously a radically different thing. We have the evidence of the stellar achievements that the scientific method to allow us to trust that these guys are onto something with their method.

What the theists are doing here is using two different definitions of the same word and treating them as the same thing anyway - a so-called equivocation fallacy. A glaring example would be:

Banks are a good place to deposit money into.
Rivers have banks.
Therefore, we should deposit our money into the edges of rivers.​

I like this from Bill Maher:

• "We're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken - with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens ... I'm open to anything for which there's evidence. Show me a god, and I will believe in him. If Jesus Christ comes down from the sky during the halftime show of this Sunday's Super Bowl and turns all the nachos into loaves and fishes, well, I'll think ... "Oh, look at that. I was wrong. There he is. My bad. Praise the Lord." - Bill Maher

 

[Desert Snake]

• "I always flinch in embarrassment for the believer who trots out, 'Atheism is just another kind of faith,' because it's a tacit admission that taking claims on faith is a silly thing to do. When you've succumbed to arguing that the opposition is just as misguided as you are, it's time to take a step back and rethink your attitudes." - Amanda Marcotte

That's a terrible, misunderstanding, of the argument.

Rubbish.

 

[omega2xx]

I am finding that I cannot communicate with theists here, the same pattern I have experienced elsewhere. We are simply so different that discussion is all but impossible. What am i doing wrong? Logic does not move these people, I have no other way of thinking. So we are at an impasse. How can I talk to these people in terms they will understand? It is frustrating because I wish to understand religious belief and religious people, if I am to judge religion and religious belief fairly and to treat religious believers less contemptuously and dismissively. As I have been tasked to do by RL persons.

First of all, all of the Christians were humanist before we were converted. We understand what you say. From my discussions with you, it seem you do not want to learn, you want to preach. The only way you can learn is to get involved in the discussions.

 

[David T]

I am finding that I cannot communicate with theists here, the same pattern I have experienced elsewhere. We are simply so different that discussion is all but impossible. What am i doing wrong? Logic does not move these people, I have no other way of thinking. So we are at an impasse. How can I talk to these people in terms they will understand? It is frustrating because I wish to understand religious belief and religious people, if I am to judge religion and religious belief fairly and to treat religious believers less contemptuously and dismissively. As I have been tasked to do by RL persons.

Well they suffer from normalacy so the wuestion for are you that? Of course religion is crazy thats "normal". Of religion tends towards crazy and its foundational to contempory "reasoning" you need to examin me your own reasoning although apparently you believe" its perfectly fine!!! Thats "normal". .

 

[Akivah]

I am finding that I cannot communicate with theists here, the same pattern I have experienced elsewhere. We are simply so different that discussion is all but impossible. What am i doing wrong? Logic does not move these people, I have no other way of thinking. So we are at an impasse. How can I talk to these people in terms they will understand? It is frustrating because I wish to understand religious belief and religious people, if I am to judge religion and religious belief fairly and to treat religious believers less contemptuously and dismissively. As I have been tasked to do by RL persons.

I didn't get the sense that you were looking for an honest discussion of theists beliefs. Your thread of 'religion being replaced by science' was just you trying to impose your beliefs on others. I thought my posts to you, about the irrationality of your claims were entirely logical. I extended your claims to philosophy in a logical
manner and I thought you understood my analogy.

I think it's obvious that you've already judged religion and found it to be lacking. And in so doing, you dismiss the thought processes of everyone that disagrees with you. So I don't understand why you want to discuss the matter further as you sound very sure of your beliefs.

 

[RedDragon94]

I am finding that I cannot communicate with theists here, the same pattern I have experienced elsewhere. We are simply so different that discussion is all but impossible. What am i doing wrong? Logic does not move these people, I have no other way of thinking. So we are at an impasse. How can I talk to these people in terms they will understand? It is frustrating because I wish to understand religious belief and religious people, if I am to judge religion and religious belief fairly and to treat religious believers less contemptuously and dismissively. As I have been tasked to do by RL persons.

Sorry to hear. I think science can show you which religion is the correct one is. Follow scientific principles since they govern reality, and then see which religious traditions match those principles most closely.

 

[columbus]

First of all, all of the Christians were humanist before we were converted.

BS.
Most Christians were Christians before they were taught humanist values. They learned Christianity the way I did, from my parents and community.
Same with every other religion. The overwhelming majority learn it as toddlers.
Tom