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[Grek]

You have to have a probability for every theory. Otherwise, you can't make choices about the theory's predictions. Example:

You've just moved into a new house. Your new next-door neighbor, Sam, says that the little old lady who lives down the road is a witch and will curse anyone who owns a blue car. You have a blue car. You don't want cursed, conditional on curses existing, but you also don't want to have to paint your car. How do you decide whether or not it's worth it to paint your car?

Probabilities! Your evidence with regards to the existence of witches and witch curses should tell you that witches probably do not exist - if they did exist, you'd have heard about more (and more credible) cases of witches cursing people, and the law books would have statues against using magic to assault people. None of that happens, so you conclude Sam is crazy, joking, drunk or something and doesn't know what he's talking about.

Even if it's just a gut probability instead of a formal number, you should at least have some notion of how likely you think the theory is for every theory that exists.

Also, @Creaca: Spoiler tags, please!

[Fenrir]

It was a clumsy way of saying “I think it more likely than not that there is no god.”

[Grek]

Yeah, I understand that. The prior post was more in response to Leafsnail saying that non-falsifiable theories should not be assigned a probability.

[Leafsnail]

Even if it's just a gut probability instead of a formal number, you should at least have some notion of how likely you think the theory is for every theory that exists.

I broadly agree, but if a theory makes no predictions there is no evidence to go on and thus no way to assign a meaningful probability.  EG: try to give me a probability on "there is an invisible, intangible unicorn in the forest that has absolutely no observable qualities".

It goes into "Arbitrarily low/ doesn't matter" for me.

[lemon10]

I will note that "Thou shall not kill" is a mistranslation. It really is supposed to read "Thou shall not murder".
This allows killings in wars, as punishment, as well as when you are ordered too (since I don't think that would count as murder).

It is a good commandment, but hardly groundbreaking, especially since it doesn't actually prohibit those who have the power to order people executed from executing them for whatever they feel like (since while they do kill them, it isn't really considered murder).

[SealyStar]

I will note that "Thou shall not kill" is a mistranslation. It really is supposed to read "Thou shall not murder".
This allows killings in wars, as punishment, as well as when you are ordered too (since I don't think that would count as murder).

It is a good commandment, but hardly groundbreaking, especially since it doesn't actually prohibit those who have the power to order people executed from executing them for whatever they feel like (since while they do kill them, it isn't really considered murder).

Speaking of bizarre [mis]translations, I was just thinking about the traditional English translation of the Lord's Prayer.

I'm not sure if it's supposed to be poetic or just a bizarre convention, but the nature of the Greek/Latin subjunctive was apparently forgotten in the translation to modern English, creating bizarre constructions like "Hallowed be thy name", instead of "May thy name be hallowed", "Thy kingdom come", instead of "May thy kingdom come", "Thy will be done" instead of "May thy will be done", etc.

[Frumple]

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry was involved. "Hallowed be thy name" sounds a hell of a lot better than "may thy name be hallowed". Something something passive voice?

The meaning changes a bit, too.

[Pnx]

Yeah, it's pretty well known that when John Wycliffe went for a less than literal translation. There were a lot of lines where the original meaning was smudged in favour of a more poetic verse, and those lines generally stuck around.

[Creaca]

I will note that "Thou shall not kill" is a mistranslation. It really is supposed to read "Thou shall not murder".
This allows killings in wars, as punishment, as well as when you are ordered too (since I don't think that would count as murder).

It is a good commandment, but hardly groundbreaking, especially since it doesn't actually prohibit those who have the power to order people executed from executing them for whatever they feel like (since while they do kill them, it isn't really considered murder).

I hear this all the time, and I'm not really sure where they get it from. Kill is translated from 'ratsach', if you look into other places in the bible, the word 'ratsach' is also used when god puts people to death. So if it is "Thou shalt not murder." The bible accuses god of murder. :s

What's more, the commandments are a series of laws, when you realize the meaning of murder is Unlawful Killing, you get a commandment that says "It is unlawful to kill unlawfully."

[lemon10]

I hear this all the time, and I'm not really sure where they get it from. Kill is translated from 'ratsach', if you look into other places in the bible, the word 'ratsach' is also used when god puts people to death. So if it is "Thou shalt not murder." The bible accuses god of murder. :s

What's more, the commandments are a series of laws, when you realize the meaning of murder is Unlawful Killing, you get a commandment that says "It is unlawful to kill unlawfully."

Retzach

The Hebrew verb רצח (r-ṣ-ḥ, also transliterated retzach, ratzákh, ratsakh etc.) has a wider range of meanings, generally describing destructive activity, including meanings "to break, to dash to pieces" as well as "to slay, kill, murder".

According to the Priestly Code of the Book of Numbers, killing anyone with a weapon, or in unarmed combat, is considered retzach.[2] The code even includes accidental killing as a form of retzach.[3]

The Bible never uses the word retzach in conjunction with war.[4][5] The Covenant Code and Holiness Code both prescribe the death penalty for people that commit retzach.[6][7]

The act of slaying itself, regardless of questions of bloodguilt, is expressed with the verb n-k-h "to strike, smite, hit, beat, slay, kill". This verb is used of both an Egyptian slaying an Israelite slave and of Moses slaying the Egyptian in retaliation in Exodus 2:11-12.

Another verb meaning "to kill, slay, murder, destroy, ruin" is h-r-g, used of Cain slaying Abel in Genesis 4:8, and also when Cain is driven into exile, complaining that "every one that findeth me shall slay me" in Genesis 4:14, he uses the same verb.

And some other site that interprets it the same way.
From a little searching, it appears that most sources view it this way.

[Creaca]

I don't understand where you're coming from I'm afraid. You linked me two sources, one from Christian Apologists who try and equate that it's directly linked to murder, which would follow your point but is coming from an extremely biased source.

However, your other less biased source points out that it can literally translate to killing or slaying in addition to murder. And in fact simply the act of killing with a weapon can be considered retzach. It even points out that Moses, prophet of god commits retzach on an Egyptian man. It doesn't really forward your point at all, though I suppose it muddies the water.


In addition, as I said before, even if it did mean to Murder, you'd have a law telling you to follow whatever worldly laws define unlawful killing, which isn't very useful.

[Starver]

You are mixing agnosticism with atheism there. Atheism means that you believe in the non-existence of any gods/divine beings.

A-theism or Athe-ism?  Personally I self-identify as atheist and I am a "not-GodBeliever" rather than a "NotGod-believer".  Weak atheist, implicit atheist, whatever you want to call it, I'm an atheist who is not a "devout disbeliever".

I'd be sceptical, in the less populist sense of the word, if I imagined that there'd be anything that could definitively prove the situation either way. As such I also self-identify myself as agnostic (there's no way of truly knowing, one way or another) and apatheistic (there is nothing special I should be doing) and various other things that some people still persist in assuming lie on the "Theist->Atheist" axis (with Agnostic apparently being in the middle), but which I personally treat as being on different axes altogether, providing for any number of viewpoints (the devout believer who acknowledges that he can't prove his belief, the person who does nothing to adhere to a religion but is eagerly awaiting a 'sign' to latch onto, etc, etc).


edit: Turns out I was ninjaed almost immediately with other posts of this kind...  Sorry, but I've been getting so many 504 Gateway Errors on the forums, tonight, that I got out of the habit of reading ahead at all, before posting...

[Starver]

Nope, there were also a lot of people who expected them to drop off the world at that time. And before the explorers set off, most people judged that the earth was flat - because you could stand steadily on it without falling away, for instance.

I didn't see anything said on the remainder of the page on which this post appeared, but I do hope that someone has disabused you of this, as well.  Sailors (and many others) knew well enough that the world was round.  Some of the more theologically inclined (but by no means all, as there are famous exceptions) might have had reasons to maintain it was flat, and your average peasant just had no reason to be bothered, but practically involved people like sailors and other traders will have had the evidence in front of their own eyes all the time if they considered it.

How round, was usually the question.  (The oft-mentioned Eratosthenes was apparently surprisingly close, but as we may have back-calculated the particular unit of measurement he used, it's hard to know whether the cart is before the horse or not.)  Anyway, Columbus thought he'd gotten further around the Earth than he had (regardless of how far he actually thought he'd be going), and it was before actual Longitudes could be measured either.  And he was useless at what geography knowledge there was, but that's another story.

[Micro102]

Well I define faith as believing in something without any good reason, aka evidence. How is religion not faith based?

I didn’t say “religion”, I mentioned atheism and theism, neither of which are religions, and I am not using your definition of the word faith. When people say that something is “faith-based”, they mean that the believers don’t care about the evidence or the logic, they just “have faith” that they’re right. They just trust that God is or is not real.

Is theism not the belief in a god or deity? How is that NOT a religion?

What would you define faith as?

[Starver]

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Okay, this ones moving away from the society thing again. I mean, you certainly should break a marriage contract with someone, that's bad.  But really, this is going into the top 10 commandments from god? How about no pedophilia? Or no rape at all for that matter?

This one is actually feministic. Limiting sex to marriage guarantees that as a woman, you won't be left with a child and a father who runs away. This one is protecting the mothers, and even though the "family being the cornerstone of civilisation"-line is very cliched, that does not make it any less true.
Very positive.

Only if the term "adultery" (in whatever original language and connotation it arises from) covers all extra-marital sex (i.e. including the pre-marital stuff).  A married man and a (differently) married woman reproducing actually doesn't do too much harm in itself, and as such conceivably (NPI!) leaves the child with a caring father even if not their biological one.  (The woman's actual husband might have objections of his own if he ever deduces or is otherwise informed of any deception that took place, to which the "Do Not Lie" commandment would either be most appropriate or most counter-productive, depending on circumstances.  Without the serious examination of physical traits or anything that would later become genetics/etc, I'm sure there were very happy lineages that were different on paper to what reality actually was, in the long-run.)

While there obviously will have been a prohibition against pre-marital relationships (and probably the historical equivalent of shotgun weddings to sort out some of those that did happen, I don't believe these are covered at all in any modern reading of the ten commandments, although I'm sure an interested party can still find something in Leviticus, or elsewhere, to justify the resulting societal condemnation.

(Yeah, still catching up a bit.  But now I've started to chatter on this long-watched thread, it appears I'm addicted to doing so.)