How can fundamentalists not wake up?

[FatAndFaithless]

Has the apocalypse happened yet, oh wise professor?

[Minimalist]

"A little nonsense is relished by the wisest man."

What would you know about it? You really think a dead jew came back to life for your fucking sins.

Idiot.

[YGninja]

What YG said.
You guys are a scream.
Which is one of the reasons I come here.
Willie Wonka said; "A little nonsense is relished by the wisest man."
You guys are in a veritable lake of nonsense gazing out, thinking everyone on shore is deluded.

I havn't claimed any position, im just asking questions which, as yet, havn't been answered.

[KevinM1]

They don't wake up because they don't want to be killed, or banished from their community. Whether they believe it genuinely or not, they have to tow the line or their lives will be over.

Fundamentalists also perpetuate the cult cycle. Everyone outside of the community is evil, amoral, and the enemy. Outsiders and their beliefs/thoughts/literature/art are craven and dangerous. So, fundamentalists tend to stay inside their self-reinforcing echo chambers, and defend their beliefs and way of life with a zealous fervor. Questions are threats.

[Esquilax]

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Probably a little thing called "evidentiary support," which the college curriculum has, and the bible stuff does not. Hey, that was easy.

What YG said.
You guys are a scream.
Which is one of the reasons I come here.
Willie Wonka said; "A little nonsense is relished by the wisest man."
You guys are in a veritable lake of nonsense gazing out, thinking everyone on shore is deluded.

When I read this, I imagine one of those Hallmark cards, that reads:"I couldn't find a cogent rebuttal to what you're saying, so I got you an ad hominem attack instead."

[YGninja]

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Probably a little thing called "evidentiary support," which the college curriculum has, and the bible stuff does not. Hey, that was easy.

What YG said.
You guys are a scream.
Which is one of the reasons I come here.
Willie Wonka said; "A little nonsense is relished by the wisest man."
You guys are in a veritable lake of nonsense gazing out, thinking everyone on shore is deluded.

When I read this, I imagine one of those Hallmark cards, that reads:"I couldn't find a cogent rebuttal to what you're saying, so I got you an ad hominem attack instead."

Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

[Cyberman]

What YG said.
You guys are a scream.
Which is one of the reasons I come here.
Willie Wonka said; "A little nonsense is relished by the wisest man."
You guys are in a veritable lake of nonsense gazing out, thinking everyone on shore is deluded.

"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men" - not the permanent state of nonsense you both advocate and personify... professor.

[Norman Humann]

Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Faith is belief without evidence. When you have evidence, believing something isn't blind.

[Mister Agenda]

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover twice is what broke me of being a Christian, and it was in college that I realized that at some point I had become an atheist, through a combination of learning more about science, more about logic, and more about religion.

I can even recall the exact semester, though not the day, that it happened: I was taking Logic 201 and Introduction to Religion the same semester. My religion professor was an Orthodox Christian and big on apologetics. My logic professor was big on fallacies. As I learned the various fallacies, I watched my other professor making them in every single one of his arguments. He was an intelligent, learned man, and he had to turn his mind into a pretzel to try to justify his belief. And I see that over and over in theists, especially literalists: perfectly good minds, twisted into pretzels trying to convince themselves that their faith is reasonable.

Some professors may try to indoctrinate you, my religion professor certainly did. But the thing that breaks people's faith in college is finding out what their parents and ministers didn't tell them. Of course, the effect of preparing a child for the revalations of college just means you endanger their faith sooner, if you're a fundamentalist.

Of course, going to college tends to have little effect on the faith of liberal Christians, who weren't taught that evolution is a lie and science is a conspiracy to perpetuate that lie and everything in the Bible actually happened exactly as portrayed. A certain comfort level with ambiguity is a strong defense against new facts breaking your faith.

---

Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Far from it. In college (except for Bible college, of course) one is generally rewarded for fact-checking.

And Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority appealed to is an inappropriate one. Appeal to Einstein on the General Theory of Relativity, and you've committed no fallacy. Likewise if you refer to Stephen Gould on a matter concerning biological evolution. It isn't possible to be more of an authority than the people working in the field concerned on everything. Where you run into trouble is appealing to Einstein on theology or Gould on celestial mechanics.

But if you really have a problem with, say, the Theory of Evolution, there is nothing preventing you from learning it backwards and forwards and seeing the evidence for yourself by visiting museums, laboratories, and active digs. Get a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology or paleontolgy and expose the conspiracy from the inside!

[Esquilax]

Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

College courses, particularly in fields dealing with factual reality like science, prize fact checking, falsification, and extensive referencing. That's part of the reason colleges have such stringent rules on citations; they want to know that you actually have looked into the topic yourself.

That's also why the reportage for science and math subjects require that you show your work. The two don't require faith of any kind, by design.