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Author Topic: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief  (Read 20065 times)

ChairmanPoo

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #90 on: April 29, 2012, 07:27:13 pm »

I do so love these debates, but damned if I don’t hate losing.

You don't, nor do you win. Why do you put it in such terms?
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
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Fenrir

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #91 on: April 29, 2012, 07:29:09 pm »

I do so love these debates, but damned if I don’t hate losing.

You don't, nor do you win. Why do you put it in such terms?
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
Perhaps we should play a nice game of chess instead.
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bitesh

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #92 on: April 29, 2012, 07:33:23 pm »

A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
No choice, you're playing it now.
Also, you made me think about the game (that other game). Shame on you.

Perhaps we should play a nice game of chess instead.
Now THAT, you would win. I suck at chess.
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Shinotsa

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #93 on: April 29, 2012, 07:34:24 pm »

I do so love these debates, but damned if I don’t hate losing.

You don't, nor do you win. Why do you put it in such terms?
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
Perhaps we should play a nice game of chess instead.

Points awarded. Your point balance is now: 1 Internets
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bitesh

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #94 on: April 29, 2012, 08:03:27 pm »

Points awarded. Your point balance is now: 1 Internets
Well, Fenrir, I guess you did win.
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It only takes a second to show someone how you feel about them. The police call it "indecent exposure", but whatever.
Quote from: I-Ching
You lose your efficacious tortoise, and look at me till your jaw falls down.

penguinofhonor

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #95 on: April 29, 2012, 08:14:06 pm »

I find I can win debates by ducking in towards the end and mocking people for arguing in the first place.
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EveryZig

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #96 on: April 29, 2012, 08:25:01 pm »

I find I can win debates by ducking in towards the end and mocking people for arguing in the first place.
Therefore the way to defeat you is to keep the argument going.

...Now I just need to think up something that to do that.
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Leafsnail

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #97 on: April 29, 2012, 08:25:48 pm »

Or to just ignore him like we did last time.
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bitesh

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #98 on: April 29, 2012, 08:39:40 pm »

I find I can win debates by ducking in towards the end and mocking people for arguing in the first place.
Whatever tickles... your fancy. No. Whatever prances... No. However that saying goes.
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It only takes a second to show someone how you feel about them. The police call it "indecent exposure", but whatever.
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moocowmoo

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #99 on: April 29, 2012, 08:41:37 pm »

I agree with what Deathworks and ChairmanPoo were saying on the first few pages. Just seems like building an argument on shaky ground when you try and quantitatively measure things like belief, unbelief, and intuition. Then to draw conclusions from data taken in such a questionable fashion just seems irresponsible.
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Bauglir

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #100 on: April 29, 2012, 09:09:54 pm »

I find I can win debates by ducking in towards the end and mocking people for arguing in the first place.
Shit, and here I thought I was clever.
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Deathworks

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #101 on: April 30, 2012, 02:43:46 am »

Hi!

Given that a lot has happened while I was sleeping, allow me to discuss in a more general vein.

First of all, I am always a bit surprised by people desiring to put discussions into a context of losing. Personally, I only see people winning in a good discussion. The only way you can "lose" in a discussion would be if the discussion itself became a waste of time by people not talking with each other...

Secondly, you may recall that I described myself as an atheist with agnostic awareness. Personally, I give agnosticism the theoretical potential to be used as a belief system, although it is beyond my ability to move there. In order to function mentally, I have to give some answer to the God-question, so I have to split believing from knowing.

Giving percentages for something that you don't have the slightest knowledge about seems rather silly, so suggesting that agnostics give theism and atheism 50:50 or anything sounds rather silly. Why do they need to give percentages? Can't they simply say they don't know?

Claiming that agnosticism/agnostic awareness is a natural result of rationality is a bit short sighted in my opinion. Because in doing so, you would logically suggest that all who do not have at least agnostic awareness are irrational (which kind of brings us back to the general field where the original article dabbled in). True agnostic awareness, however, has serious consequences for the way you perceive things and how you act. For instance, trying to convert people to your belief system is counter-intuitive for someone with agnostic awareness, since you may actually be factually wrong and the ones you would be trying to convert may be actually factually right. Likewise, deriding people for their belief system or belitteling or insulting belief systems is also counter-intuitive for the same reason. You might even argue against discrimination and prejudices against religious groups, although I am not quite sure if an argument in that direction is absolutely water proof. Anyhow, even if you just go by ridicule and converting, you can kind of identify at least some of the people who do not have agnostic awareness by the way they talk and act. And remember that numbers do not make right. For an agnostic, some indigenous belief system held by some people on the Easter Islands may just as well be the truth as may be Catholicism, atheism, the religious views of the ancient Greeks or the Mayas. I don't have statistics, but I have a hunch that a lot of people would be removed from the list of potential agnostics just by these few crude pointers, which are by no means exhaustive.

But if people who are not agnostically aware by implication irrational, then it bodes rather ill for the rationality of humanity.

Personally, I think that we are talking more about the depth of critical analysis rather than rationality per se. A person of any belief system can be highly rational, even towards their own belief system without automatically becoming agnostically aware. That awareness only comes along when you analyze the very root of your belief system, which is, in my opinion, not something that you are required to do normally, and which is thus not mandatory for rational thinking.

Also note that few belief systems describe themselves as "this may be the truth". Usually, claims go along the lines of "this and this is the truth".

Yours,
Deathworks
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bitesh

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #102 on: April 30, 2012, 03:00:35 am »

Yeah, pretty much...
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It only takes a second to show someone how you feel about them. The police call it "indecent exposure", but whatever.
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You lose your efficacious tortoise, and look at me till your jaw falls down.

Shinotsa

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #103 on: April 30, 2012, 10:20:49 am »

I thought we were done with all this. I was just being silly with the 50/50 thing, and the winning/losing thing was just the result of praise for a movie reference.

Also, one of the core themes of social psychology as taught by my professor was that humans are irrational. I suppose this means that agnostics are much rarer than they ought to be, but I still believe that grouping anyone who puts thought into their beliefs as agnostic is a poor way to classify groups. Granted that's how it is with turtles, tortoises and terrapins. Tortoises cannot be terrapins, while all tortoises are turtles and all terrapins are turtles, though not all turtles are tortoises or terrapins.

On second thought, let's not go to classification. Tis a silly place.
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bitesh

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Re: Analytic Thinking can Undermine (religious) Belief
« Reply #104 on: April 30, 2012, 01:54:30 pm »

That sounds like one of those questions from (internet) IQ tests.
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It only takes a second to show someone how you feel about them. The police call it "indecent exposure", but whatever.
Quote from: I-Ching
You lose your efficacious tortoise, and look at me till your jaw falls down.
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