ex-President Trump
I assume it's still acceptable to have a Trump thread in a Politics forum?
So this is an obvious lie - basically aimed at low-info Boomers like my religions aunts. I have two questions:
a) Is anyone here who supports Trump bothered by lies like this?
b) Does anyone know what he's even talking about here? Like is there some grain of truth that he's embellishing on bigly?
The actual serious point I was making that I have made before, is that the intelligence demerits you get for being seriously religious depend on the year you were born and whether or not it is your contention that logical thinking should lead someone to believe that it is your religion is more likely than not to be the truth.
If you believe something in spite of recognising that it is logically/objectively a false belief, you don't fit my definition of being intelligent, unless you're basically clinically mentally ill or something.
If you believe something in spite of recognising that it is logically/objectively a false belief, you don't fit my definition of being intelligent, unless you're basically clinically mentally ill or something.
To be fair, most religious people don't claim to have any kind of logical reason to believe. The whole point is believing despite the lack of evidence, called faith.
Amen
Cept, that there's no logic in the alternative either
To be fair, most religious people don't claim to have any kind of logical reason to believe. The whole point is believing despite the lack of evidence, called faith.
Most people can't live believing uncertainty is basically the true structure of reality (at least, the measurable part of reality we know for now), and that's orthogonal to intelligence i think.
Smarter people will have unsubstantiated beliefs at the basis of their model of the world in approx the same proportion as less intelligent people, they will just detach them 1 or more step away, making them more abstract; intelligent people will have fewer "objectively false" beliefs, but more "unprovable" beliefs.
Like, catholicism went basically that route. No need to deny the big bang if you are smart enough, you just say god is the entity which started it, and /or the entity that decided the constants in physics.
No need to take the bible literally if you say it's all a metaphor written for the people of that time, you go backward enough to "unprovable" beliefs anyway.
"life begins at conception" -> it's arbitrary anyway when you decide human life is morally worthy of protection. Some cultures wait a tad after birth for example. So that's just a preference, you simply take the preference which you think your god has as well.
If you read enough "high level" jewish or catholic theology (no idea about protestant one, that i studied far less), it makes more sense than most social science papers lol. It talks about nothing / unprovable things all the times, but at least the claims are properly un-verifiable so you can't basically ever tell they base their ideology on falsity.
They just postulate and go from there. That's what logic does all the time anyway. And you need to do the same as well if you don't want to end up in the ultra-skeptical/nihilistic necessary consequences of never accepting unproven postulates (Hume).
"cogito ergo sum" *is a declaration of faith*. "things exist because i perceive them" is as well.
It takes pretty smart people to go deep into those theological intellectual masturbations, at least under the normal, academic, definition of intelligence, same as you need academic intelligence to be able to read and write papers about neomarxist fourth wave feminism in the information age (you get approx the same from both branches of "knowledge").
I am not sure why you think really intelligent people will usually not believe in unproven things.
They will reject basic explanations of religion more often sure, but it's absolutely the same qualitatively if they go 3 steps over that and go with "god is the pattern of universes that are born out of nothing then expand then collapse, god is what stays outside time and allows for that to happen" or "our act of experiencing the world collapses the cloud of uncertainty of particles and waves into a single moment of certainty, we as observers shape the universe and we are in god's image because of that capability, with god being the omniviewing obverser outside of the space-matter-time continuum".
Perhaps if you give me some ideas of who you think is really smart currently or in history i can give you the list of unproven and unprovable things most of them believe in.
For ex Einstein "god doesn't play dice" is quite telling in this regard (maybe you don't consider him intelligent though).
Ah, a very important detail : more intelligent people are less conformist and more rebellious (they hate being subjected to the will of others more because they "see" through the lies used to justified claims and power hierarchies easier). That alone can very strongly correlate with anti-religiousness (in the sense of a distrust of organized religion) but doesn't necessarily changes the pattern of having to believe in a set of unproven, assiomatic elements of reality in order to be able to cope with reality.
frivolous motions keep failing
the former president knows he faces likely conviction
fact that the Defendant waited a mere 17 days prior to the scheduled trial date to file
the motion, raises real questions about the sincerity and actual purpose of the motion
Trump’s strategy of frivolous delay continues in each of his criminal cases.
They have to speed this up. We can’t let the American people decide who they want to lead this country.
The two best things dems have going for them are their claims that trump is a bad boy rule breaker and he’s racist and unfortunately the racist claim is falling apart (see below). Taking him off the ballot may be the only way to stop him. Last election dems were successful in defeating him by illegally using the intelligence community - now they badly need the judicial branch to help them.
“Gallup polling this year showed that Democrats currently hold the lowest lead they have had with Black voters over Republicans they have ever had dating back to when the polling began in 1999 and their 12-point advantage over Republicans with Hispanic voters is the lowest since 2011.”
@Luciom - that's a lot of words saying "religious people don't really believe anything too silly". Who are they talking to when they pray then? If it's some pixie in the sky and they're asking him to intervene to heal the sick or rig the lottery specifically for them, or saying thank you for their dinner or whatever, that's pretty stupid, i.e. "not intelligent" in my book.
Yes, I agree that people yearn for structure and a model of the world and whatnot. Science is hard, "magic pixie done it" is easy, especially if you're a bit on the dumbdumb side.
@Luciom - that's a lot of words saying "religious people don't really believe anything too silly". Who are they talking to when they pray then? If it's some pixie in the sky and they're asking him to intervene to heal the sick or rig the lottery specifically for them, or saying thank you for their dinner or whatever, that's pretty stupid, i.e. "not intelligent" in my book.
Yes, I agree that people yearn for structure and a model of the world
no, that's a lot of words to explain how smart people still believe a lot of unprovable stuff, while appearing non-religious (and being less religious in general), they differ from others less than you seem to believe in terms of building their own model of the world upon faith (belief in things without evidence).
You can be 100% based on faith with no prayer. And it's not more "credolous" , not a bigger abdication of logic, to talk with "god" or "spirits" or "the ghost of your granma" vs "yourself". Rituals aren't illogical either. If you frame an internal dialogue as with "another entity" or not, the difference is superficial (and it can work better to frame it as something else external from you, for results, depending on what you are after), the main part is they both have internal dialogue.
Discovering actual measurable causal effects in subatomic reality is pretty hard, reading a few pages summing up the main elements discovered by others in the last 50+ years isn't hard at all (at normal+ IQ levels).
"maxic pixie done it" vs "the best idea we have of how it started is that the whole universe was at some point contracted within a single point within which the laws of physics as we know them don't work at all" is the same at the end when you think about it
Btw trusting the clerics who interpret the bible isn't very different from trusting the guy summing up research, and the people doing research, on stuff you have no way to verify yourself. It's still faith, you can't prove they aren't just lying to you.
model and structure you have with stocastic descriptions of reality as well, what most people in the whole range of intelligence yearn about is *certainty*.
Most human beings aren't framed to think stochastically about the whole of reality, at most about some events, and sparingly at that.
Lol dude, just no. "Science is really the same as religion when you think about it" is not doing it for me. Nor is "Internal dialogue is the same as talking with an imaginary friend". Nor is "Believing in god is the same as believing in the big bang cosmological model". Nor is "Trusting the priest is the same as trusting the research assistant writing up the experiment". These comparisons are just silly, and I strongly suspect you don't actually believe them and are just being contrarian.
Btw, the magic pixie done it model postulates that the magic pixie is still around to listen to you whine and will randomly intervene to suspend the laws of physics on your behalf. The big bang model leaves open the possibility of having a magic pixie that set the process going, but he didn't hang around to intervene in it after about 10^-43 seconds, and that exponent gets smaller the more we learn.
What are all these things that smart people believe without evidence? Give some examples please.
It's not belief. It's a humility before the truth
We don't need to go down the list, unless you want to assign to religion all the blame for the shitshow that is human history.
Lol dude, just no. "Science is really the same as religion when you think about it" is not doing it for me. Nor is "Internal dialogue is the same as talking with an imaginary friend". Nor is "Believing in god is the same as believing in the big bang cosmological model". Nor is "Trusting the priest is the same as trusting the research assistant writing up the experiment". These comparisons are just silly, and I strongly suspect you don't ac
not "science" , some considerations left unexplained by science about the origins of the universe is the same as religious beliefs when you think about it.
And yes believing other people about claims you can't verify yourself, is believing other people claims as the basis of your belief system.
not "science" , some considerations left unexplained by science about the origins of the universe is the same as religious beliefs when you think about it.
No, it really isn't. "Science" doesn't claim to be able to explain everything, but it supports its explanations with evidence, and it explains more and more with the passage of time. Religious creed is the exact opposite of that in every regard enumerated above.
And yes believing other people about claims you can't verify yourself, is believing other people claims as the basis of your belief system.
No, it isn't, and this is a tiresome game that (usually) religionists like to play with the words "belief" and "theory", subtly substituting one meaning of the word for another. "Believing" in god is not the same as "believing" that matter is made from atoms, and while creationism and evolution are both "theories", one is a theory in a colloquial sense (i.e. any hypothesis) and one is a theory in a scientific sense (i.e. a hypothesis verified by empirical fact). Now if you want to start claiming that "belief" in chemistry and biology textbooks is the same as "belief" in the bible, then, well, lol.
I always find it amusing when people state that science and religion can't co-exist. I find these people not smart.
No it's not about the concept of "theory", i am saying that if ou didn't conduct the experiment yourself, any finding by others require you to have trust in other people, or in the process (not in the scientifical process, in the peer review process, the publication process and so on).
If you didn't personally measure the blood of subjects in a medical test, why do you blindly believe the people who claim the measures are x y z? why is it different from believing a shaman who tells you he literally talks with god?
There's a spiritual element to life, and the discovery of atoms doesn't mean much to me. Should it?
Like seek and you shall find! If the universe was of an elemental composition we couldn't identify... or had yet to identify.. which was the case for millennia
which btw is why "scientism", ie blindly believing what you perceive to be the consensus about something as truth, is very akin to a religion.
Nothing to do with believing the scientifical process is decent at determining what's true in general. But epistemiogically deep inside the chain of reasoning about what you use to determine "truth", there is faith. For example faith in the idea that rules of physics are constant (why should they be?) within certain limits (which we only very recently discovered).
There is faith (as defined, again, simply in the belief of unprovable things) behind most considerations about reality
There's a spiritual element to life, and the discovery of atoms doesn't mean much to me. Should it?
Like seek and you shall find! If the universe was of an elemental composition we couldn't identify... or had yet to identify.. which was the case for millennia
I think that the discovery that subatomic particles are 1) both particle and waves 2) stochastic in their essense (they aren't THERE, they are in a cloud around a point , their location is a probability distribution, not a place) was very spiritual.
Moreover the irony of "atom" meaning "indivisible", and then we go at it's component is... a spiritual lesson in a way
Atomized, tho lol
It's all good. I understand there's a lot in the Bible that seems weird or contradictory. It's a mystery to Billy Graham, Karl and Doyle Hargreaves in sling blade.
But there's also profound stuff in the text. Inconceivable stuff
