What are your thoughts on Richard Dawkins?

[Thumpalumpacus]

So how, exactly, is it pseudoscientific? It makes no pretense at being scientific. It is a method for individuals to address their own emotions, not a means of interrogating nature.

Well if it's not scientific then how does it even have any evidence supporting it and how is it any more non-worthless than homeopathy or things that definitely are pseudo-scientific?

You're trying to hammer nails with a fish taco, bud.

Do you have any evidence that red is your favorite color? Do you have any evidence that you felt sad on Tuesday?

I didn't say it had any evidence supporting it as an objective approach to dealing with subjective emotions. I said it has helped me. You're so wrapped up in your own framework you're unable to see outside your own boxes.

... says you.  You really need to stop using that word "we".  It's arrogant.

But we're both doing that not just me and I don't see how it makes either of us arrogant.

Fair enough. I'll be more cautious using that word.

You cannot speak to anyone else's subjective experiences.

That's kind of my whole point.

No. Your point is that it's pseudoscientific, a word with a taint to it insofar as it indicates pretense to science. You're once again appealing to science in a realm that science cannot and does not address, namely, the management of emotions. But, by adding that prefix "pseudo-", you're poisoning the well by asserting that mindfulness claims to meet scientific standards. It doesn't. It meets living-life standards, for many folks.

I certainly can control how I accept things.

Well we can accept things but I don't personally see how we can control things. It certainly seems that way to you and certainly doesn't seem that way to me.

You're not answering what I wrote. I didn't write that I can control things. I wrote that I can control how I accept things.

We can all speak for ourselves more than we can speak for anyone else but... far from being arrogant I'm saying we can't even speak for ourselves as much as we think we can... because we can certainly experience what seems to us but 'what seems to us' is all we can experience and the fact we seem to be able to control things--or at least it seems that way to most people--is not the same as us actually being able to control them.

I'm saying not only do we have zero authority on how others experience things but we actually have less authority over our own experience than most of us think we do, IMO.

Can you meet your own standard of evidence for this claim?

It's kind of like a... to choose our own thoughts we'd have to think something before we think it, kind of thing, and I'm saying feelings and actions and anything else we do is exactly the same way. Choices are something that are on the outside but not in the inside, ultimately, IMO.

Then you're not understanding what I'm saying. I've never said that we can choose our own thoughts. What I've said is that people can choose how they respond to emotions by using certain tools which allow them to attain some distance from their emotions. If you weren't so busy being obdurate you might look into it, but you clearly do not want to, and I've got not interest in preaching to you.

No matter how much you say it cannot work for me, though, it has, and not only by my own perceptions but by those who know me very well.

I think we all only speak for ourselves and our own subjective experiences because it's all we can know. I think that's because it's all we have access to and all we can expereince by definition.

I'm just saying that I think most people think that their conscious experience itself and their intelligent agency leads them to reasonably conclude that they have control over it when IMO I think it doesn't. I think such a conclusion is unreasonable because the alternative possibility of them not having control would be an identical experience... and so I'm not sure what it would even mean to have control besides 'happen to be less impulsive'.

Do you hold your own opinion to the same evidentiary standard that you're demanding of mine? It doesn't seem to me that you do.

Well... it depends what you mean by 'I' in these statements.

"I" means I: the first-person singular.

But my question would be what would things look like if it was all down to pure luck and circumstance and your own happening to steer things that way better than previously when you had less luck and were more impulsive and had more fails of willpower?

You may have explanations for why your willpower fails less now but then what led you to the things that led you to that? What would reality look like if it's ultimately down to luck and at the end of the day it's all a snowball effect and you ultimately don't know why things started to go right for you even if you think you do? I think reality would look exactly the same and what often seems to us is just seeming and that seeming is not indication of control.

And like I said... I really do struggle at explaining this stuff.

Clearly. You're appealing to a hypothetical in order to rebut experience. You're also inserting words in my mouth that I haven't spoken. I don't see any point in continuing further, so I'll drop the conversation ... but not my objection to "pseudoscientific". I'm tired of Maslow's Hammer beating me over the head.

[trev22]

He's smart, but theoretically ? I haven't seen any companies using his theories and formulas. (My eyesight is a bit blurred out recently).

[Alexmahone]

I for one think that he is quite an intelligent guy. I think he has written some great books. I have only read one of them and that was called The God Delusional. But to be quite honest, whenever I hear him speak I have found that he comes off as quite smug and seems to talk down to those with other opinions. I'm an agnostic not I am not atheist nor Christian, so maybe I am a little biased.

I agree with everything you say. Dawkins is highly intelligent but can be quite condescending. Try reading his first book "The Selfish Gene"; he is a far greater biologist than he is an atheist.

[Succubus]

I agree with everything you say. Dawkins is highly intelligent but can be quite condescending. Try reading his first book "The Selfish Gene"; he is a far greater biologist than he is an atheist.

The blue is a ~verbatim line from someone who was twatbanned a few months ago.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think he used to be a lot more patient with people he had discussion with, but has lost it a bit after years of beating his head against walls of "lalala I'm not listening" like this:

[GrandizerII]

He used to be intolerably arrogant, the snobby type. I like him better now as a cranky old man.

[Mystic]

Atheist philosophers refuted his books themselves. They hold no substance, just propaganda. And he won't even admit they been refuted.

He is a fool who thinks he has intelligence.

[Brian37]

He used to be intolerably arrogant, the snobby type. I like him better now as a cranky old man.

I never viewed him that way. I simply think, like many scientists and atheists, he is tired of bullshit dumbing down society.

[Ravenshire]

Atheist philosophers refuted his books themselves.

Who?

[Brian37]

Atheist philosophers refuted his books themselves.

Who?

I wouldn't say atheists as much as other scientists, but not about everything he has written, but his "meme theory" which he came up with in the 70s did catch shit from his peers.

Personally, when I first heard of "meme theory" I thought it was bullshit too. But now, really all he was saying was that marketing works, and that part is true. I simply think he was trying to reinvent the wheel. Marketing does work, otherwise nothing would grow, not business products, not political parties, not religion. 

There is a physical aspect to communication, and there is a biological evolutionary truth to your body responding to input that you interpret as positive CAN boost your immune system, even if such a belief is false. Just like a child will feel good believing in Santa. 

Outside that, especially with his book "The God Delusion" I think he is spot on as to the evolutionary root as to why humans gap fill and create or fall for those claims.