Over think everything? Or he is very much connected and wants to infect Subsim with non-info to help the enemy recognize the false informatiomn.

Or is me just a guy who wants to know some info.

No that couldn't be it.

Does this strike anyone else as the behaviour of someone who wants some info? Does it even strike someone as being the behaviour of the most vindictive person you've ever met?

Oh... it was an inadvertent rhetorical question.:oops:

He strikes me as your typical internet troll who needs to say stupid and shocking things to anonymous strangers in a vain attempt to make himself relevant, even if it's just as an object of their derision.

We've got a couple more like that around here although they do tend to be far less clumsy about it than this one. :yep:

I know, but he's violating the "language stupidity threshold"; the point at which an action is so stupid that it cannot be reconciled with the intellect of a person capable of communicating the idea. Even if all he wanted to do was gain attention by becoming an object of derision, he's likely to be brigged or keelhauled for trolling, so the action is counterproductive. In short, I refuse to believe that a person can purposely be that stupid, and I know a thing or two about being stupid.

you are all too good for me and my little voice. sorry if what I have said was offensive. i can only write what i believe.

Well, we're open to discussion about many things here but it's hard to take opinions like that with a grain of salt, Third Man. From my own experience, expressing oneself in those terms has a way of turning people off real quick. Don't be so surprised by the cold reception you got. I would expect the same treatment if I went off the rails like that.

Moving right along...

I have to debate this. Science has no similarity with religion, I challenge you to point out exactly what is so similar about them in your opinion, Third Man. Science is not a 'Belief Structure' as religion is. Science accepts that whatever little it claims to know with a measure of certainty may be proved wrong in some future moment. Science is purely a method of determining truth to the highest possible level of accuracy through the testing of hypotheses, and the recording and analysis of data - EVIDENCE. Also it's benefit to you, me, and human kind in general is immeasurable not to mention obvious.

Atheism could be considered a belief structure, similar to religion in that it is a personal choice to believe certain explanations about life, the universe and everything. The fact that atheists would more likely choose scientific explanations over mythological or fantastical ones only points to a more realistic, more open minded, more contemporary viewpoint about life in general. :yep:

Religious belief is a belief structure in which untruth is a fundamental necessity. You can say it should be viewed metaphorically which means it depends on personal interpretation. The holy books themselves do contain some moral truths which can be valuable lessons for anyone. I believe August said in a previous post 'to try and explain a concept that is way too advanced for them to comprehend at their present level of development' I agree I just think it's about time people grew up a bit. Moral development does not exclusively come from religious involvment. There is a view that without good ol' organised religion, that people would rape, murder and steal themselves into anarchy. If that is truly the case, why is god(fearing) not stopping them now?

Oh but it is stopping many of them. The disparity comes from the fact that not everyone is religious but more importantly many of those who claim to be religious are not in practice.

Besides I wasn't just talking about a moral code to follow. Religion is about way more than that.

Of course theoretically the criminal justice system does that too, and is far more certain as to punishment. I think more people do not commit crimes not because they are afraid god will punish them, but because of fear of real world punishment. I could also go into the theories of social conformity and why people tend to conform to group norms, but I'll save that for another time.


The Third Man, I suggest you behave yourself and stop with the childish attempts at shocking others with your 'extreme' opinions. Your on the gangplank to getting keelhauled, and not impressing anyone.

A very important point to make and understand.

A metaphor has nothing to do with literal truth. The conflict between science and religion comes into play when the metaphorical truth of any religion's teaching is considered by believers to be literally true when there is either no evidence that it can be, or an abundance evidence that it cannot.

This is why Joseph Campbell once said that all myths are true for their time. IMO some of them are true for all time, because they attempt to illustrate or express some fundamental bit of human experience or understanding that cannot be expressed as well or as powerfully in any other way. Whether or not they are literally true is irrelevant if you're not hung up on the idea that they must be so in order to have any merit.

In a strict sense, this still does not make them "true for all time".

I understand what you mean, but let's leave absolute statements out of all this. If mythology would be like science, then one could compare that true-for-all-times-myth to a paradigm in science, which could be seen as a "meta-theory", a habit of how to think of lower, subordinate theories (and how to form them), that usually has a longer lifetime than the normal scientific theories of "every-day-science". But even these paradigms change over times, or more often: they get replaced. Just imagine that myth-building often depends on attempts to make sense of observations of natural phenomenons, from weather to stars in the sky. But our understanding of these phenomenons has changed over time, and sometimes the phenomenon itself has changed, too (star constellations forming today's zodiac constellations for example looked very different from Earth some thousand years ago, there were times when people thought very different stories in what we call astrology today, because they indeed saw different things in the nightly sky, and thus they probably have told very different stories than those revolving around today's zodiac constalltions. Not to mention that these constellations are just arbitrary creations of our imagination, and have no reality in themselves).

Where myths deal with cosmology and our understanding of the natural world, this is of course true.

But I think the notion holds up when it comes to the inner world of human nature, consciousness, and experience. Some metaphors continue to resonate over the centuries because they speak to things that are still part and parcel of the human experience.