Make a quotable quote here.

[Annik]

Quote someone else, then.

"Anal glacier" -- My art history professor.

[Tempus]

"Quoting myself makes me feel pretentious."

"Tempus is not sure which is worse, quoting oneself or referring to oneself in the third person. Probably both simultaneously..."

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

"Don't quote me bro!"

[Annik]

"Don't quote me bro!"

That happened at Hovik's school.

[Waratah]

Fuck it, is not a good place to be at.

[Angrboda]

---

“There is always a riot full of words behind every little event in his life.”

"Stupidity is like the coat of a porcupine. It provides its bearer with warmth and protection. To everybody else it furnishes worry and stinging nettles."

"Breadth is only skin deep." (neither breadth nor depth alone is informative)

"Like nailing butterflies to the wall."

"A property which does not vary is not a property." (A change of state that doesn't result in a tangibly perceptible change is either illusory or unknowable, or both)

"Are you asserting an ethic to help others, or simply because you are uncomfortable not asserting one?" (See the Greek concept of epoche)

In response to, "Science hasn't proven it yet, but it will...." I say, "The truth doesn't issue promissory notes in lieu of results."

“I should create a “recommended article template” for religious apologia on Wikipedia. It would consist of four sections. 1) state the problem, 2) talk at length about irrelevant details, 3) claim the problem is solved, 4) praise Jeebus.”

"Atheist blogs, like Ftb, aren't the product. Blogs are the sizzle that sells the steak; they are a marketing tool — they are advertisement. They sell atheism. They don't expand or develop it. They are the used car salesmen of free thought."

"The theist argues that nature exhibits design analogous to that demonstrated by man. Yet if this were the case, it would be difficult to distinguish the acts of nature from the acts of man. The acts of nature are only asserted as man-like in what they might be if a creator, wholly unman-like and exhibiting design principles beyond our ability to recognize them as such. The more analogous a feature of nature to a man-made design, the less god-like its requisite creator; the more complex and inexplicable, the less man-like the process of its creation. Therefore the analogy fails two-fold: where it is analogous to human design, it is less needful of a god; where it is needful of a god, it is not analogous to the designing of men."

"Likewise, if God is the analog of man, and man’s intelligence and care is nothing more than the workings of a clockwork mind, physicalist, determinist and impersonal, then any god fashioned on an analogy with human minds and emotions becomes likely also a suspected clockwork being — no more or less a product of its own causal pathways playing out their nature, with no chance to deviate from a course which once set in motion, cannot alter its course."

My parable of the picky eater, a reaction to Buddhist tradition transmission: "If you take some piece of food, and smell it, and aren't sure whether it smells good or bad, you may set it aside for later. Upon coming back to it, you find it definitely smells bad. The key question is, however, was it bad when you first smelled it and it got worse over time, or was it originally good and only became bad because it was set aside for a time?" This is a common conundrum in hermeneutics, but it appears that Buddhists are allergic to hermeneutics, at least as it applies to their transmission of tradition, aka the Dharma.

More on Buddhist tradition: "The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is a popular figure in contemporary Buddhism. However many westerners will be oblivious to the simple nuances in his name. Like many Asian names, the family name comes first in Vietnamese names (usually), then the middle name, and then the given name. A westerner might easily conclude that Hanh was his family name without the context of Asian naming conventions. There is a further complexity with Chinese and Japanese names in that, many of them are Anglicized for western audiences by reversing the order to reflect English naming conventions. Thus Wang Fei becomes Faye Wong in American representations. So if you came across the name of a Zen Buddhist in the literature, say Hu Wei, in order to unravel the meaning of their name, you would need to know both how the context of origin affects the name order, as well as how the translocated context affects that name order, in order to properly deduce surname and given name. Unfortunately for the Dharma, we don't have all this information." (see, for example, the work of Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method)

Moar on Dharma: "Boddhisattva: In a society where everybody is practicing Buddhism, it may be impossible to tell whether or not Buddhism works because in any society, there will be a portion who are naturally wise, compassionate or enlightened; in a Buddhist society, observing such individuals, it will be impossible to assign their successful personalities to being the result of Buddhist praxis or natural causes. However, confirmation bias and illusory correlation will tend to reinforce the belief that the result is not due to random chance (nature) but rather due to non-random factors (specific praxis, i.e. the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings)."

Even moar:

---

4. The Buddha came to believe that there is no self, anatman, because when he looked for the self, he couldn't find it. However this is an improper inference from his experience because there are (at least) two separate cases that are consistent with his experience:

a) the self is not visible because the self does not exist (assumed: if S exists, S will be visible)
b) the self is not visible because, though it exists, it is not a thing whose existence can be demonstrated through introspection; it is cognitively inaccessible (it is invisible — similar to blind sight, but because...

The Buddha didn't imagine case 'b', he concluded it was case 'a'; the proper conclusion given the possibility of either case is agnosticism regarding atman/anatman (non-existence of self).

---

On Heidegger's Being and Time: "Whence comes freedom? If ruinance is an aspect of facticity and thrownness, then our ruinance has been chosen for us by its presence as past [or ending], and thus freedom evaporates [no free will]."

"Is the whole of the bible not the name of God? Surely God does not rest nestled inside this, that or another bunch of words. So is not the whole of the bible not then the name of God? But how does this or that corpus of the holy word not itself not be simply another nestling of words? Is not then the universe also a part of the true name of God? And yet there are also things of which, exist in the minds of men that do not exist in the world. Are these too, a further rippling outward of the necessity in naming God? And what of that which does not exist? Is its not existing also not a fact of God?"

“/dev/null lives a curious existence, one possessed of knowledge of existential truths about our lives we can’t hope to conceive, much less understand. Imagine. A whole existence consisting only of things we did not want. It’s mind blowing.”

---

Bad religion is as much a consequence of bad people and bad philosophy as it is other intrinsic features which make it go sour. However, atheists in their own turn adopt religiously twisted interpretations of an ethic upon which to oppose religions. There are to my view, among the most important determinants of religious behavior, five factors:

1) The inability of the human animal to reason in anything like a rational fashion.
2) The tendency toward religious belief among the under-educated. The more ignorant, the greater the tendency toward religiousity.
3) Intelligence. The more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are able to distinguish truth from error, and the more likely they will trust in their intellect to guide them to the deferral of external authorities, whether they be bishops, professors, or a self-elected peer group.
4) Factitious nature — we are all born into families and communities which possess bodies of shared truths which they pass on to the arriving generation through the authoritarian tools of forced education (which even if not per se forced, is taking advantage of the situation: how can I choose not to place my interests and the interests of my parent in the same basket?).
5) Humans vary along certain dimensions that affect their core sensitivity to whether certain types of ideas are believable or not — these include but are not limited to: schizotypal personality traits, activity of certain neural mechanisms such as the dopaminergic system, and the activity of mirror-neurons.

These five factors strongly influence the likelihood and likely character of religious belief, they are not themselves freely chosen, and they cannot be “fixed” by presenting a persuasive argument based in science or reason. What then is the point of the atheist intellectual argument?

---

[JohnDG]

People often believe that what they see with their eye's, is all there really is to see.

If the answer to your questions have never been to look inside yourself, how could you expect to find them anywhere else? *Immortal Tech*

[Ben Davis]

Possibly the mantra (sic) of the polymath:

There's no information which is completely useless.

[Angrboda]

People often believe that what they see with their eye's, is all there really is to see.

There's an acronym for this: WYSIATI (what you see is all there is)

[kılıç_mehmet]

No, ultimately friend and foe go extinct and the planet and sun die and there is no record of the good or the bad that evolution produces.

Then what exactly is the source of the compassion that you just boasted before me? At the end, they are simply nothing more than a speck of dust in the whole universe. The fact that the sun will die out someday does not really extinguish my sense of purpose.

You cant serve a greater purpose, you can only make life the purpose you chose for yourself.

No, this purpose was there before I was born, and will exist after I'm gone. It's greater than me in all regards.

"Greater purpose" no such thing never was, never will be. But when we say something like "The greatest generation, meaning the soldiers of the allies that defeated Hitler" It still wont long term be a given that this nation will stand, in fact boarders have never remained the same and powers shift. The Chinese have for thousands of years shared the same region, but they no longer have monarchies even if they have the same cultural memes and superstitions.

As I said, anything that outlasts me or the likes of me is greater than me. Generations come and go. Deeds, works, ideas, these are things that last. These are great.

What made the Allies great, wasnt an infinite ideology that would last forever, to me what they did was evolutionary, it appealed to the positive side of evolution in protecting the desire of individual freedom.

Indeed, this is why the Allies were not really great. They were simply more numerous, as they had Mother Russia and its minions at their side, who undervalues human life just as they did "individual freedom", or whatever you think that allies stood for.

But Hitler also thought he was doing the "nobal" thing.

And indeed he was. What can be more noble than to profess your love and undying gratitude to your nation? However, he was not really great at calculating his moves.

The dark side of evolution also produces alpha males that seem to do a good job of keeping things in line.

"Alpha males"? "Evolution"? I don't know where you're getting at, friend. It's not about keeping things in line. Ideals are not there to keep things in line. Ideals are there to make things go forward.

Maximizing benifit and minimizing harm is the only "greater purpose"

Indeed, that's what we all try to do. But it depends on the time scale. What seems to be harmful or not that profitable in a short timescale, might be benefitable in the long term. People with base minds will always seek small scale happiness, while people with ideals will seek greater benefits, and therefore, less harm.
However, there might be people who profess to ideals that always produce harm, and no benefit at all. Such ideals eventually die out.

The Nazis were wrong because their greater purpose was to save face and dominate without regard to who they hurt and their people

The Nazis were simply unsuccessful. In terms of ideals, I don't think that they were really that wrong. They did actually see realities in most things. Their actions were simply badly timed.