Okay, firstly - 6 year old post.
Secondly, the OP was just asking if there are things we believe that we only believe because someone else has given us the information. The things I listed are simply things I believe without personally experimenting/experiencing their reality for myself. I...
^ This.
On a personal level, UKIP seems like the type of thing you'd get if the Daily Mail decided to transform into a political party. Really not my cup of tea.
It's a bit hard to try and cause a person to entertain doubts when they're "impervious" to our fiery darts though isn't it? Anything we say shall bounce off of your shield of faith, shall it not?
So I won't bother, I'll let the Bible give it a go, you might listen to that;
God's plan looking...
Cancer is just a by-product of how our bodies grow and repair themselves. In a way multi-cellular organisms are just a controlled form of cancer, all our cells are designed to replicate themselves ad infinitum. It's only through chemical mechanisms that this growth is kept in check, when a...
It's code. In some gnostic systems male equates to spiritual whereas female equates to mundane/physical - probably because of the female's capacity to procreate (and thus trap more spiritual energy in physical bodies). You can see this in the myth of Barbelo, the feminine Hand of God, yet she is...
I'd say that for descendants of African slaves it's very much a matter of racial pride, being proud of who they are in simple physical terms as well as cultural. Just being a POC can be significant and important, historically and personally.
That's xenophobia. Xeno = foreign, phobia = fear, so...
I'd class it as shared superficial morphological characteristics, so pigmentation of skin, hair and eyes, skeletal structure (i.e. prominance of brow ridge/nose bridge/mandible width), presence of epicanthic folds, structure of the hair shaft etc. Personally I also extend it to shared cultural...
This is a weird conversation. It makes me wonder what all those forensic scientists who can tell a murder victim's ethnicity from a piece of jawbone would make of the concept proposed here that there are no racial differences.
Granted, the genetic differences within an ethnic group may be...
My understanding is that Paul removed most of the Jewish restrictions to diet and ritual cleanliness to broaden the appeal of his new Christianity to the pagans of the Roman Empire. It's why Christians ignore the restrictions against pork and shellfish, despite the fact that they're as important...
I didn't leave a goodbye message when I stopped coming here before, so here's one now.
Believe whatever makes you happy. Don't take to heart other's criticism, their opinions aren't important.
People don't like being told they're wrong or made to look foolish, so they rarely back down...
Except of course that theists rarely lump themselves as "theists" unless it's in an argument with atheists. They're Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Wiccans, they share significant aspects of their lifestyle, diet, marriage views, political outlook etc etc, because their worldview has been...
Of course it's not a mental illness. For a person who is gay, homosexuality is the normal way for their brain to function. Ironically it can be a cause of mental illness when people choose to repress their homosexual nature because of societal pressures.
To use the video game analogy again, the illusion of continuity of nature and form from one level to the next of the game is solely a projection of the underlying code. It doesn't matter that the next level might use utterly unrelated data from a totally different area of the system memory to...
That atheists are considered a coherent minority as also weird to me. There is no reason for any two randomly selected atheists to share any common aspects to their worldview, other than that they don't worship any kind of deity.
I also don't see why an atheist should feel the need to defend...
Does it?
If you observe the mind you'll notice that it isn't a continuous, interrupted flow. Rather, it's more like a series of separate yet interrelated snapshots, built around a basic feedback loop. One thought/experience filters back to the brain which induces another.
In addition, modern...
It's only really in the last couple of years that the oddness of the atheist label has actually instilled itself upon me.
I mean, in how many other aspects of our lives do we define ourselves by that which we lack? Not having a belief in a deity should affect our personality about as much as...