Coddling adults who believe in fairies seems unwise. To me, obvs.

(September 21, 2016 at 4:15 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Coddling adults who believe in fairies seems unwise.  To me, obvs.

Well sure.  But here in duh Babble Belt, I'm surrounded by fairy worshipers.  (And I'm not talking about the homosexual variety of "fairy".  THOSE they kill on sight.  False gods, or sumthin'.)  An iff'n you try to tell yer boss there ain't no gosh-durn fairies, your ass gets fired, see.  So ya gotta chip away at that fairy idea real gentle like.  "What if they can't really fly?"  "How DARE you!!  Blasphemer!!"            

(September 20, 2016 at 6:30 am)Little lunch Wrote: I like the Allegory of the cave. I've never heard that before.
It seems to me that ex-theists would stand the best chance of using the Socratic method on theists successfully as they have lived in the cave before.
It's also no wonder that people who have never been a theist would think theists are stupid, having themselves never experienced living in a cave.
I willing to bet that quite a few fancy that they would have seen through the illusion of the shadow even if they were born in the cave.

I wouldn't use Platonic idealism to argue against christians myself, especially considering that a lot of christian theology is a melding of platonic idealism with the earlier mesoptamian ideas in judaism. The works of Augustine of Hippo essentially brought in neo-Platonism as an essential part of chrisatian dogma.

Remember, Plato's allegory of the cave is essentially saying that what we experience in our everyday lives, what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think is only a dim shadow of true reality, which we as corporeal beings cannot truly experience.

In my opinion your arguments and your dialectical strategy are as good as tools for a especific purpose.

So if you are (like Hitchens) trying to make a point against religious harmful practices on a live debate (his natural habitat), then you should by all means apply the same agressiveness as he does, on the other hand if you are talking to one person only, and you are really interested in making that person think critically you should never do the same.

The problem its that an argument or tatic its only as good as it is efficient on changing someone perception/perspective/stance, so it will wildly vary depending on your public type and your public predisposition/stance...

When dealing with someone's else belief, if you really are trying to do anything good for the person, would be a stupid strategy to mock the person or be condescending, regardless if the idea deserves or not to be mocked.

The aim of the conversation would be to induce critical thinking on the listener, and yes for starters on rethoric or whenever you don't know how enthralled someone is with their belief, the maieutics its a excelent "to go" strategy to induce the critical thinking (it was developed for that purpose)

Arguments and dialectical stances/strategies are your tools for comunication and the right tool must be used for the right purpose.

As a new forum user, came to me as a bitter suprise how dick can some of you guys be when trying to say something, to the point it becomes irrelevant to the listener what exactly you were trying to say in the first place.

But as a rule you should always leave your jerking off to your own brilliance out of the debate if you want your listener to really think about what you have to say.

When I mock the afflicted, I'm not doing it to help them.  They're lost souls. I;m not even interested in getting them to think about their religion (I'd rather see them think a whole lot -less- about their religions). I do it so that we don't live in a world where ludicrous and barbaric religious beliefs hide behind the veil of polite and undeserved respect.

Let me remind you of the field here.

We've got one group of ghouls that advocate stringing up the better man.
We've got another that expect to see the general of their divine master race appear, someday..and crush the rest of us underfoot.
We've got another group that keeps blowing shit up.

(September 27, 2016 at 12:34 pm)_Velvet_ Wrote: In my opinion your arguments and your dialectical strategy are as good as tools for a especific purpose.

So if you are (like Hitchens) trying to make a point against religious harmful practices on a live debate (his natural habitat), then you should by all means apply the same agressiveness as he does, on the other hand if you are talking to one person only, and you are really interested in making that person think critically you should never do the same.

The problem its that an argument or tatic its only as good as it is efficient on changing someone perception/perspective/stance, so it will wildly vary depending on your public type and your public predisposition/stance...

When dealing with someone's else belief, if you really are trying to do anything good for the person, would be a stupid strategy to mock the person or be condescending, regardless if the idea deserves or not to be mocked.

The aim of the conversation would be to induce critical thinking on the listener, and yes for starters on rethoric or whenever you don't know how enthralled someone is with their belief, the maieutics its a excelent "to go" strategy to induce the critical thinking (it was developed for that purpose)

Arguments and dialectical stances/strategies are your tools for comunication and the right tool must be used for the right purpose.

As a new forum user, came to me as a bitter suprise how dick can some of you guys be when trying to say something, to the point it becomes irrelevant to the listener what exactly you were trying to say in the first place.

But as a rule you should always leave your jerking off to your own brilliance out of the debate if you want your listener to really think about what you have to say.

As a new forum user, let me remind you that you're not on christian forums any more and we don't evince the same reverence for unevidenced bullshit they do over there. Go to a country where you're belittled and discriminated for your belifs before you start giving out about angry atheists. A little humiliation might make you realise why sometimes we get narky.

In order to apply RA you need the formality of defining what you need to prove. Works for math, not fuzzy philosobabbled gods. These are not with form.

(September 30, 2016 at 4:55 am)Tazzycorn Wrote: As a new forum user, let me remind you that you're not on christian forums any more and we don't evince the same reverence for unevidenced bullshit they do over there. Go to a country where you're belittled and discriminated for your belifs before you start giving out about angry atheists. A little humiliation might make you realise why sometimes we get narky.

I've never been a Christian, nor used their forums.

I already do realise why sometimes you guys get narky, but as we (the critical thinker) are the only ones actually reasoning on the room, it falls on us to instruct people who can't think on how to think, and being angry (even with good reasons) its not a good strategy for achieving that.

This made me want to tell a history about something that happened yesterday, it is on topic but its a wall of text, so bear with me on that:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm a Sergeant of Brazil's Air Force, yesterday I had people with a heated religion argument on my workplace, they were doing a Christian vs Ubandist thing and I had to intervene because the Christian majority were being dicks to the Ubandist guy.

I could've just scold them, or even punished the whole bunch because we have rules against any religion speech inside the military base, but to what end? They would still be intolerant anyways, so instead I tried to provoke them to think critically about what they were doing.

I first evoked Jesus's golden rule, to reprehend their behavior, and as they pointed towards the Bible sometimes saying otherwise I lead them to question themselves if they rather follow Jesus or the Bible when it does says otherwise.

This alone made some of them scratch their heads.

People eventually calmed down as we continued, and I started slowly introducing the "Divine Message Inneficiency" problem as it is one of my favorites to make people rethink about the Bible reliability...

I pointed several ways that the Bible doesn't really seems like something the perfect God would use to convey his message, it allows for multiple readings and God can't really be like that, it being "unchanging" it has to be only one way to please him, and what should they do if they got the wrong reading?

(Making they realise the Bible its just a book its the first step of making the whole thing crumble, but you CAN'T attack the god figure, not for now, or they will enter "faith mode")

Asked them, if they somehow got the wrong reading, or if the book isn't really the word of the God, they expect to go to Hell forever for it? Or they deserve to be forgiven because they were willing to serve God but got the wrong readings by mistake? So what should the Ubandist guy do if he maybe got the wrong religion by mistake or by his parents teaching him Ubanda? He is really trying to please God, just like they are, what fault he has if god's message its so muddled it can be mistaken by other books and teachings?

And what the fuck its this all about? Lots of people everywhere on the world trying to please God, but they all got wrong books or wrong readings readings and now they are blowing themself up by mistake? What if you got it wrong too?

I said them to read the Bible with that in mind, trying to figure if it really can be God's word, as they are "familliar with God's kind and loving nature" they should be able to tell it is a human book.

And this was the end of it (for now), and I don't want to push them too hard, the ubandist guy called me later and thanked me for the way I dealed with the situation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We may perhaps not be as persuasive as Socrates, or even Sam Harris on inviting people to think, but I think we must try our very best regardless, its our responsibility as "the thinking person on the room" to teach the others how to think, as the end of intolerance and hate won't come from fighting back with some childish butthurted speech.

You need to be calm as you have to focus on your strategy development, if you are letting your feelings get in the way you are just doing it wrong, you are not being persuasive and you will fail to reason critically and will end up just feeding the hate, while on field you would be a dead soldier.

---

(September 30, 2016 at 12:18 am)Rhythm Wrote: When I mock the afflicted, I'm not doing it to help them.  They're lost souls.  I;m not even interested in getting them to think about their religion (I'd rather see them think a whole lot -less- about their religions). I do it so that we don't live in a world where ludicrous and barbaric religious beliefs hide behind the veil of polite and undeserved respect.

Let me remind you of the field here.

We've got one group of ghouls that advocate stringing up the better man.
We've got another that expect to see the general of their divine master race appear, someday..and crush the rest of us underfoot.
We've got another group that keeps blowing shit up.

I don't think there are ANY lost souls, they are just lost in a sea of stupidity, they are people (otherwise) just like you and me who are able to think objectively on most subjects (aside from their delusion), if we had born a while back we would think that the earth its flat (yes I'm aware some people still think that, lol)

Our enemy its the stupidity, the ignorance, not the people... and our weapon its education, we can try to teach people out of misery.

You gotta understand that the religion idea its designed to be very appealing, they are ignorant and their familiy told about religion very early in childhood, its NOT only their fault that they are stuck in there and hating you as enemy of their lord.

It can even be argued that we are to blame, because we sometimes act like I said you guys do (everyone does it sometimes), we have the knowledge to unveil their delusion, but we either don't care enough for our drowning fellow (like you), or are still YET too incompetent or powerless to teach them efficiently how to surpass their delusions (the skepticals in general, tho Dawkins/Harris/Dennet are trying really really hard)

(October 3, 2016 at 8:36 am)_Velvet_ Wrote: You need to be calm as you have to focus on your strategy development, if you are letting your feelings get in the way you are just doing it wrong, you are not being persuasive and you will fail to reason critically and will end up just feeding the hate, while on field you would be a dead soldier.

You know it takes some amount of nerve to demand that somebody else be calm after you've offensively belittled every single person who has a similar point of view to them, just because they pointed out your offensiveness.

Have you no decency, sir? Have you no sense of shame?

PS if you're a Sgt in the Brazilian army, my condolences to that army.

(October 3, 2016 at 10:13 am)Tazzycorn Wrote: You know it takes some amount of nerve to demand that somebody else be calm after you've offensively belittled every single person who has a similar point of view to them, just because they pointed out your offensiveness.

Please do elaborate on how I offensively beliettled you and every single person who has a similar point of view to you as I sincerely think you missunderstood something I said, it might be the case of my english (or my lack writing skills) getting in the way.

Before you do, allow me to do my part and rephrase/explain my message a bit further on points that I think I might have been vague and caused missunderstanding.

If you pay close attention, whenever I said "critical thinkers" I was using the word "us" as I meant: me, and you guys as well, so from now on everything you might think I said about you and people who share your point of view I actually said about me as well.

I proceed making a critique on how we see the deluded people, as I think they are like us (able to thinking objectively if they learn how to do it), but trapped in their delusion.

Then I divided us (the critical thinkers) into 2 groups, the 2 ways we think about the deluded people, some do care about them, some do not.

1: Ones who do not care for people who are drowning in the sea of stupidity that is delusions. (I included Rhythm on this group, as he said he is not concerned if they think or not about their religion, instead his main concern (when he is debating) its correct the way religion recieves underserved respect).

2: Ones who do care but are YET too incompetent or powerless to actually design a way to help people out of their delusions. (I included ME on this group, and said Dennet/Harris/Dawkins are the ones who are currently doing it best with their books and debates, but try as we might, we remain (for now) not having any way of persuade people out of their delusions efficiently)

This is why its arguably our fault too, not only theirs.

Perhaps not noticing that its what made you think it was offensive to you?

I will disregard your questions to my character and the personal insult as I think those are derived from a missunderstanding.