When I threaten you, I automatically remove reason as an allowable means to accepting my claim. I’ve in effect determined your choice. If you were truly free to exercise reason, I would have to accept its outcome no matter what, even if I considered you gravely mistaken. Punishment for arriving at a wrong conclusion turns reason into a thought-crime.
So when believers like Christians or Muslims contend their faiths are based on reason, one may simply object that this can’t be so because their god in fact doesn’t allow it. Using reason to arrive at any other belief than the correct one will earn you an eternity in hell. Thus, reason is in reality an evil to be avoided....Blind, unquestioning, and unexamined belief is what the theist’s retributive god truly desires, not a belief grounded in reason. Link
If Paul lived among us today and said and did the things reported in the NT, then yes, he would be crazy. But he lived in a different context. Within his cultural context, I think he was perfectly...
Right, because nothing says 'universal truth' like a series of unverifiable conversations between invisible sky beings and guys who then conveniently founded religions.
But for the trend to continue, there must not be any countervailing factors that increase in intensity as the inequality gets worse. Such as, for example, the Christian moron marks...
Every time? Really? Hmmmm! You have an invisible leash? Color me skeptic. And you do everything you are told Daniel? Waoh...the US is well and truly fucked. Capitulation of the rational. Nah, you...
Is China a "communist" country? Hardly. I would call it "state-controlled capitalism" or simply state capitalism. North Korea is a crazy dictatorship, no economic system at all....
In the USSR, we (my friends and I) got the distinct feeling that there was no system at all in the USSR. Even the people in charge of it did not truly believe in it. And that is why I...
It has taken me 30 minutes to respond, then I lost my longer comment. You were "asked" not to respond. I would appreciate it if everyone sticks to the issues posted.
And people still treat him as this wise sage despite what he wrote comes off the rantings/ravings of a mad man. That and ascribing his crap to the supposed Jesus Christ/God.
The possibility of humans maintaining control over machines that can out-think them by millions of times might become similar to a colony of ants controlling people.
Machines - still in the theoretical realm here - will be "smarter" than people, but without a self-consciousness, without any needs that they "feel" and for which...
I had a neighbor who had a bumper sticker on his pickup that read, "I didn't go to work today because the voices told me to stay home and clean the guns."
Sorry, mea culpa, I shoulda clarified. At the time, here in the UK, the yarn was that it jumped from monkeys to humans in Africa, through bestiality. The idea being that it was a homosexual...