SeVeR

Propaganda is free speech. Yes, we need to define propaganda, but if it's clear that a media source is influencing the minds of the public, then how can we let free speech protect them? My primary example would be the Fox "News" Channel. I'm going away from the beauty queen tripe here because like Fin I don't care, and I don't want to get drawn into a debate about it. But this question is related.

Freedom of speech. Should people with a voice heard by millions not be held accountable if they influence the path of a democracy? I'm talking about the media here. Should a news channel be allowed to support a candidate, providing positive and negative news accordingly? Surely this comes under the definition of propaganda. There needs to be a serious overhaul in my opinion, with stricter laws on freedom of "opinionated" speech within the media.

Yes, there probably are always reasons for why one has come to believe the things they do. Religious people either inherit it or come to a belief in God during times of desperation where such a belief provides immediate comfort. It could come through respect for another believer, or an evaluation of selected evidence, or through a combination of all these factors. If you can pin your atheism/agnosticism down to a single moment, then you can understand its origin and do something about it. Perhaps believing that their actions were a symptom of childhood rather than of religion would help remove the bias. I cannot personally pinpoint any specific cause for my agnosticism, or my criticisms of religion. At maybe 16 years old I came to the opinion that my previous schools had been trying to convert me with Bible readings and hymms about Jesus. I was read the story of Cain and Able in a Bible class when I was maybe six years old. I wonder what life would have been like if I had accepted their explanations. They threatened all that I am, all that I potentially could be, they wanted to take it away and make me a drone. When i see what religion has done to some people, I am more than just glad that I didn't accept it. Accepting religion would have been little more than death itself.

So the media are stupid but where does the buck stop? The media only hype something if people are stupid enough to listen to it.

Then you'd have to say that anyone discussing it is equally stupid for paying attention to a stupid person on a stupid platform.

Let's not give stupid people such a platform in the first place.

Yes, things were getting a little bit too diluted. Although let me add something. The positive aspects of religion cannot be had without the negative, and I am firmly of the opinion that the negative outweighs the positive (otherwise I wouldn't have posted so much). Religion is useful if one concentrates only on the areas where it can be useful; but from looking at the whole picture, which may not always be consciously acknowledged (and religion by it's nature suppresses the whole picture), it's clear to me that religion is a detrimental force.

Thus further clarifying that I don't believe it is one or the other. Nice try at cherry picking. And as for passing athiesm on, its very easy to do. Just as someone can pester you with the concept of being one with God, someone can pester your belief in God. You imply that casual religion is distinctly different from these "radicals" you talk about. You talk about radicals as if they are a specific class of religious person. Then in your next post you say this "Now with that being said, I elaborate that only the vast minority of radicals are not afraid of death" as if there is some dividing line between those who fear death and those who don't. How is the fear of death completely removed or completely unremoved NBV? Lets have some grey between this black and white please.

Religious people believe they and their loved ones will go to heaven. That's the point of an analogy. If there were a money-religion for stock brokers then maybe they will sit at home and believe they'll get a million dollars from Bill Gates' date=' and that would be their delusion. Do you know what an analogy is? How is this not how religious people think? You just defined a white to my black, so at least justify it. My example was simple enough to understand yet you have distorted it by trying to apply it to all religion in all cases. Let me spell it out for you again. 1. The act of becoming religious may be in response to losing a loved one because the religion offers an afterlife paradise. 2. This is quite clearly wishful thinking, and without any evidence for an afterlife it therefore becomes a logical absurdity to reach a belief in the afterlife in this way. 3. This is [i']defined[/i] as delusional. The NFL football players died from hypothermia/exhaustion and drowned after passing out when they were pulled too far from the boat. To say they didn't fight for life is a little insulting. What are these statistics that they knew about? One of them tried to swim for safety. That isn't fighting for survival? And perhaps the crux of the argument, what makes you think the players who died were not believers? Perhaps they let themselves die so easily because they believed in heaven? So it's rational for me to believe the tooth fairy is married to a leprachaun and they are living happily together in the centre of the Sun with a pot of Gold made out of baby teeth. You can't prove otherwise so my belief can't be irrational? Look, your condition for rationality is missing something key: evidence. You need evidence for holding a belief. Having said ALL of this, it is not delusional to believe in God outside of my example. You have taken it upon yourself to make this my argument. This is how you always argue, by distorting the other argument into something you can argue against. What i originally said was all in my original example, which i have re-produced again at the start of my post. For something to be delusional you need the requirement of wishful thinking or desire. If desire for a truth is what pushes you to that truth then you are deluding yourself. God is a 50/50 concept when absent of all Earthly assumptions or interventions. My Leprachaun example wasn't, but it still fit your criteria for rationality. So the absence of any answer provides evidence for one particular answer? God? I'll give this a go: 1. I'll create some super being with the power to perform miracles. Let's call him Basil. 2. Basil could be responsible for all the things we don't have an answer for. 3. Therefore it is perfectly rational for me to say Basil performed all these things as miracles. This is rational to you? It is utterly absurd. Lets say Stephen Hawking wrote this unknown manuscript on stellar physics because well.... he is capable of doing that isn't he? ... and i didn't even give him these attributes lol. Which is exactly why I'm saying you've distorted my words. I never said religion is delusional. I said becoming religious through wishful thinking is delusional. Another distortion of words. Hope is not belief. Being afraid of vermin is beneficial to prevent disease. Being afraid of the colour green, if that is even possible, would no doubt be a non-congenital fear. We are born with a fear of death. It is in our genes. So nice try, but you missed the point. For example I am afraid of wasps and i trace this back to when I was three years old and got stung on the ear by one. It is not an innate fear and has no useful basis. We have an innate fear/disgust for the smell of feces for instance, and this is to prevent disease. We have an innate fear of death. This was a nice example because you started with an insult about not making sense, yet here you are completely missing the point. Is this the grey area you were talking about? You must have been pretty certain to start in the way you did. ROFL and here is another failure to see the grey area. You don't flick off the fear switch when you reach a certain state of religiousness lol. How about the fear of death decreases with increasing radicalisation? Wouldn't that make sense, and wouldn't it also make your point irrelevant? The more religious you are, the less afraid to die you are. It adds to my argument, surely you see that? Continuation of your genetic material in the species is VERY rational. Already told you in the original example. Sacrifice of rationality and productivity, decreased fear of death etc. Another side effect is decreased response to normal biological stimuli such as sexual imagery and natural phenomena. If God becomes the answer to everything, then why bother looking for a different answer. Do people actually believe this? It would be quite unscientific to believe with certainty that science can explain everything. lol. Altruism is rational. As an agnostic I have no belief in God whatsoever. As an agnostic it is my imperative to argue the "grey" in debates of God's existence. As those who presume certainty in any particular direction are usually Christians, I often get mistaken for an Atheist when i vehemently criticise their faith in the black or white of the argument. Christians usually have the biggest problem understanding that I am not their opposite. But i see you've fallen into the same assumption. I have no belief in God. I have no belief in the non-existence of God. I am agnostic. All scientists should be agnostics. Why would i believe there is no God? Look at it this way. If i BELIEVE that there is no answer to the question of God's existence then I am going to criticise those who subscribe to an answer. An Agnostic has plenty to argue about. So I will attack beliefs in God as irrational (not delusional unless arrived at through a desire for such belief) because I see no evidence for them. On the big faith debate i criticised Atheists, don't you remember that? Any subscription to certainty on God meets with my criticism. You seem to view Agnostics as a wishy-washy "accept all and criticise no-one because we're not sure" kind of a people. I am fairly sure that there is no evidence out there to suggest God does or doesn't exist, so I am going to debate with those who say otherwise to learn why they think otherwise. It is interesting to me because I think desire plays a role in most beliefs, and the psychology of religion is my greatest interest at the present time.

Requiem:

Personally, I think you are disagreeing with every point raised just for the sake of having an argument, but I'll play along. I'll tell you why its delusional in the proper context: that of the example i raised. A suitable analogy would be if you are stranded on a desert island and you have faith that a boat will sail by and save you, or you believe you will find a bottle of water in the middle of the desert, or you believe that losing all your money on the stock market is OK because Bill Gates will donate you a million dollars. Sure, none of this has happened, and it could happen, but having faith in something just because it makes you feel better is delusional when there is no rational reason for it. In the example I raised, believing in God served an immediate purpose while not being rationally justified. You talk about science, but science is all about rational reasons for belief. If science predicted that a mysterious blue blob far away in the universe is actually an alien life form then it would be ridiculed as delusional if there wasn't some reason for that belief. There would have to be certain molecules detected through spectroscopic measurements. It would be delusional because the claim would be seen as a means to the purpose of worldwide fame through the media interest that would be generated. Wishful thinking without rational explanation is defined as delusional. 1. The fear of death is an evolved attribute for the purpose of aiding survival by avoiding life-threatening events. Whether you can find specific examples to the contrary is irrelevant because we simply wouldn't have a fear of death if it wasn't selectively beneficial. Are you claiming that leaving your loved ones behind is an incentive not to go to paradise? I could say that seeing your loved ones that have already died before you is an incentive to go to paradise. So what is the bigger factor? You haven't made a point. Not wanting to leave loved one's behind is the natural state when you believe in the unknown, so it doesn't change a thing, but wanting to see dead loved one's in paradise is actually an incentive for people to remove their fear of death. 2. So you're saying that there is no difference between crying for hours and taking drugs? You don't see the negatives in the latter? What i'm saying is, by taking drugs or using the wishful thinking of religion you don't deal with your pain in a non-destructive way, which leads onto the third point. 3. So your example seems to hinge on there being only two types of religious people (radical/casual) separated from one another distinctly. What separates them? Wouldn't it be far more sensible to say that there is a continuum of radicalisation, including your definitions and everyone else in between. That would suggest that every religious believer sacrifices rationality based on the degree of their radicalisation. Rationality as a relative concept makes any kind of rationalising irrelevant, and all beliefs as deluded as others. So is it equally rational for a man detecting protein molecules in a distant blob to believe it is alive, and for a man seeing his wife die to believe there is an afterlife paradise for her? One is wishful thinking with no logical basis and the other is a logical deduction. Is this what should be equal in your relative rationality? This is the whole reason i used a psychological definition of "delusional" earlier. If you desire something to be true then believing it is true, coupled with an absense of logic, is deluded and not rational.

Are you telling us that if the immediate psychological impact of deluding yourself through religion is satisfying, then this is a good thing? If you lose a loved one then religion will tell you they went to a better place and not to fear your own impending doom. So you feel better, but at what cost? 1. Your own fear of death decreases, which decreases survival probability. 2. You don't deal with your pain, and therefore you don't learn to deal with pain in general. 3. The satisfaction of resigning to a religious answer encourages the use of religion in other instances of one's life, encouraging one to sacrifice rationality and therefore productivity. The negative possibilities are endless. Maybe this wasn't your example, but there are plenty of negatives that I don't think you've considered.

some people have families to support, mortgages to pay, or just can't afford that anyway.

And i think this is the problem. You seem to think other people are telling you what to think if they disagree with you. I started my post with the words "I think", not "I demand". -EDIT- Not to mention you've taken this topic well of course anyway...

This isn't a moral issue it's a cultural one. To allow people to marry more than once would be a destructive influence on our culture, spreading misery and conflict. Men would dominate in most cases and women would suffer, a trend which runs counter to our cultural era of equality. Morally speaking there is nothing wrong with it outside of arguments about tradition. Looking at this through Darwin's eyes, dominant men and submissive women would procreate more often and any heritable traits as well as developmental traits concerning dominance would be selectively favorable creating a society more inclined towards dominant men and submissive women. One would have to debate the quality of equality to stand for such a future.

I think you should step off your high horse for a moment. We wouldn't be here if we didn't want to hear the beliefs of people with differing views. I see forum discussions as a valuable tool for learning more about the topic, and arguing a side is key to the learning process. What better way is there to gauge the veracity of your doubts than to get other people to do the work for you?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgo...est/8003067.stm ROFLed... the best bit was this: "Strathclyde was the only force in the UK to admit it had Jedi officers" and ""The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde Police with their Jedi police officers and staff."

Many people would say Hitler was a Catholic. Some would say Hitler is the reason why the theory of evolution is wrong, but then if Hitler was right about evolution he would have won the war. Stalin was an atheist but what about his atheism influenced his policy? In religion we have wars waged to spread the religion, but did Stalin wage war to spread atheism? No, he waged war to spread communism.

I'll tell you why parasite or virus theories always fall down in my eyes. The transmission of such a virus would always imply that the process is involuntary and unselective. Conversion is voluntary and selective. There are better analogies that explain conversion as well as many other characteristics of religion.

I think there are a number of rebuttals for your argument that the strong are also religious. Firstly, the strong by their nature will use religion to dominate the weak, and being seen as religious is important to fool the weak. As i said earlier, religion is a uniting of opinion that brings about survival benefits (with the sacrifice being rationality), and it is therefore important for the strong among society to be seen to embrace religion, as the weak will see their opinion united with the strong. They will welcome that which will ultimately oppress them. I see you described this in later paragraphs, so does this not strike you as a reason for the strong to appear religious? The reason i believe the weak populate religion is simple. Religion provides us with a purpose and a method of achieving this purpose, it provides a way to reach perfection both morally and spiritually, while providing safety, security, immortality, an answer to the big philosophical questions, and a special relationship with the most powerful and knowledgeable entity in the universe. It takes our naturally evolved desires and tempts us with a perfect solution. This is why Christianity always appealed to the lower classes, the weak and the desperate, as the prospects of living a fulfilling life were minimal. This is also why we find Christians in schools, hospitals and prisons. Where else do you find people as easily fooled or desperate? The weak are tempted with psychological candy, and they are prone to accepting it.

The definition of atheism is a toughy. Even Wikipedia has problems: "Atheism is the philosophical position that deities do not exist, or that rejects theism. In the broadest sense, it is the absence of belief in the existence of deities." In summary: 1. A belief that deities do not exist. 2. An absence of belief in deities. These are not the same thing as Bak pointed out. However, if an absence of belief in deities is really what defines atheism then this would include agnosticism wouldn't it? So i will have to stick with the first definition. Atheists have a belief that God doesn't exist. Dawkins spent plenty of time trying to prove that God doesn't exist in his God Delusion book. He even went so far as to misinterpret the agnostics position to paint them with the same irrational belief he has (He divided agnostics into TAP and PAP agnostics, with the irrational belief that we may one day answer the God question or that we never will - to make such an assumption would make the agnostic just as religious as the atheist or the Christian)

No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even know they had done so. That is my epistemology thanks to Xenophanes. However, that which appears apparent or intuitive, that which comes from observation or through logical laws that stand up to the scrutiny of observation, or that which we put our very survival in the hands of, are probable truths. I would call this wisdom, or the sum of all deductive reasoning on our quest to find truth. Now if you follow, the wisest words i could speak are that i have no knowledge (or justified true belief), as all my deductive reasoning has led to that conclusion. Wisdom is what is useful, knowledge is an illusion, truth is unattainable. But i could be wrong of course

Nothing is provable... who are you quoting in the thread title?