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Justifying Your WorldView to an Impartial Onlooker.
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Join Date:Posts: 26383
antiskeptic wrote: »☺
We are to imagine a hypothetical deaf, mute, brain dead impartial observer who doesn't speak English lying in his hospital bed with myself and Mark sitting either side outlining our positions.
Above his bedstead, nailed to the wall is this framed quote.
We must therefore persevere. I think not.
Cause its far fetched?
You believe a man once lived that could create food from nothing, walk on water and had zombie powers. Yet the hypothetical above is far fetched? :pac:
I think the above hypothetical is far more believable to be honest.
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nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »Ahhhh the Jarvis Cocker conundrum as I call it.
In the song Common People the girl was trying to see what it was like to live like the Common People. The main narrator of the song eventually comes to the realisation that she can never truly understand their condition however.
Why?
Why indeed. Also why is it that 'Common people' as sung by the captain of the Starship Enterprise seems to capture the right mix of incredulity and outright fantasy when I read this thread? Even manages to throw in a much needed face-palm on the album cover :pac:
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Mark Hamill wrote: »So your entire argument, the reason you have avoided my question for so long is that you can't convince someone of your worldview unless they are significantly on their way to believing it?
Ahhh it was been quite a few years since I have seen, heard from, or thought about the greasy but aptly named Matt Slick. But you just made him pop right back into my head. Actually last I heard of him was when his daughter came out as atheist and.... if memory recalls..... came public about all kinds of horrible abuse she suffered at her fathers hands. Though I might be mixing him up there, so apologies if I am!
Anyway... he advocated a form of Christian Theism Apologetics which he called "Presuppositionalism" which is basically the position that he can prove to you god exists and Christianity is the one true religion.... if you would only make the small concession of accepting up front that god exists and Christianity is the one true religion.
To refuse to make that concession was in his view close minded and biased and unfair to him and almost malicious.The idea that this child who was brought up with no knowledge of religion thereby becomes impervious to the very idea of God seems to run counter to the whole missionary aspect of Christianity.
I think it also goes against much of evolutionary biology too. We have evolved things like the intentional stance and hyper active agency detection.
We are at the level of our very biology therefore, predisposed to the fantasy that an intentional agent is at work behind the reality around us and the things that happen there.
The idea therefore that a child brought up in an environment sterile to religious thinking would be less inclined towards religious memetic infection is for me like saying that someone brought up on an island entirely sterile of bacteria would be less inclined to catch the common cold.
In fact for both memetic and genetic infection I would say A) he would still be very much inclined to become infected and
having never built up any immunity perhaps even MORE so.
We exist in the universe and we do not know how or why this situation has arisen. As demonstrated by the theists who post on this thread......... and forum over the years......... they have not a shred of argument, evidence, data or reasoning that suggests that whatever the explanation turns out to be..... that a non-human intelligent and intentional agent was involved.So for example, if you decide not to follow a given course of action because it is a sin in your belief system, that's fine by me.
Not to single you out here but just thinking out loud I wonder if we can push on that one a little, just for fun
There are parents, some of them now thankfully serving justice in jail cells, who refused to bring medical treatment to their own children..... sometimes for relatively easy to manage medical conditions..... leading to the children suffering greatly or even dying. They did this because the medical intervention was an affront to the god they worship.
So they decided not to follow a given course of action because it was a sin in their belief system.
Is that fine by us? Should it be?0 -
nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »Not to single you out here but just thinking out loud I wonder if we can push on that one a little, just for fun
There are parents, some of them now thankfully serving justice in jail cells, who refused to bring medical treatment to their own children..... sometimes for relatively easy to manage medical conditions..... leading to the children suffering greatly or even dying. They did this because the medical intervention was an affront to the god they worship.
So they decided not to follow a given course of action because it was a sin in their belief system.
Is that fine by us? Should it be?
Of course not, but then parents aren't their children are they? If as an adult, they refused the medical treatment for themselves, I'd think them dumb but happy enough to let them proceed. Denying your child medical treatment because it does not accord with your belief system is not the same and personally I'd consider it abuse. This illustrates the boundary between where the rights of a parent ends and the rights of the child begin.0 -
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