"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory."
-Leonardo da Vinci-
"Thus you may multiply each stone 4 times & no more for they will then become oyles shining in ye dark and fit for magicall uses. You may ferment them with [gold] and [silver], by keeping the stone and metal in fusion together for a day, & then project upon metalls. This is the multiplication of ye stone in vertue. To multiply it in weight ad to it of ye first Gold whether philosophic or vulgar."
-Sir Isaac Newton-
Today I've watched a theological debate in a facebook page that usually doesn't talk about religion, which is a good way to have a look at what random people think about the topic, for some reason a guy posted the following image:
What followed is a typical example of an argument among people who are generally not well informed about the topic they are talking about, regardless of the side they are taking.
So here it comes the guy saying that the poster was wrong, and the other guy saying that religion is poison and so on, but one thing appeared to be common to both sides: a complete lack of arguments.
The thing that troubled me the most is this comment: "i don't give shit about what you believe in , live your life and let other people live in way they like it"
That's the kind of bullshit dogma that most of today's so called "liberals" seem to live by, and one of their main reasons for pride.
This is the kind of guy who wants to picture himself as a super-partes defender of the offended and upset.
First of all, he doesn't give any reason why one should not criticize this or that idea or belief. Secondly, an appropriate answer to the offended people could simply be the glorious quote by Stephen Fry "Are you offended? so fucking WHAT?".
The moment you say that everybody should be free to see the world the way they like, is when you stop having the right to criticize fundamentalism and barbaric practices like the genital mutilations, the stoning of adulteress, the suicide bombings, the oppression of homosexuals and the raping of children (no, I'm not talking about priests, I'm talking about children marriage in Islamic countries).
There is no self-corrective mechanism to interpret the holy books, the different interpretations are not based on the text itself, but rather on the zeitgeist flowing through the society in this or that particular geographic area, in this or that particular time.
If moderates are entitled to hold their beliefs, just because they've been watered down by humanistic principles, regardless of how silly they are, the same should be done for all those who have a different interpretation, including fundamentalists.
Fortunately, humans CAN understand that bronze age mithology is not a good source of ethics, and in practice, they don't use it, most of them just don't want to admit it because they invested a lot on the idea of a creator, and they prefer to distort reality and bend over backwards to find a suitable interpretation of the books rather than being open to the possibility of being wrong, mostly, I think, because of pride.
Then comes the guy who posts a picture of Leonardo da Vinci, with the intent of showing that, being such a brilliant man religious, this should justify religion itself.
This is of course the old, flawed, argument for authority and has been thoroughly exposed to all of its fallacies, but since it's a recurrent "argument", I think it's worth spenting a few words on this.
Leonardo (just like Galileo and Newton and many others) was religious because religion was the only way to explain most things back in his times, this doesn't mean that his ideas spawned from the bible or that he would be religious if he lived today, his ideas were so profoundly spectacular exactly because they were achieved despite the lack of knowledge about physics and science in general back in his times, and why was that so? Because we had not invented Science yet and Faith was the only (flawed) epistemology available back then.
We know plenty of things about the famous discoveries of Newton, because they work, we know much less about the fact that Newton was also an alchemist trying to find a way to turn metal into Gold, we don't consider all of Newton's Theories valid because Newton was a genious, that's not enough, and that's why we don't consider his ideas on alchemy legit. If the genious of those people was enough to justify religion, it appears to me it would have to be the same for everything else those people have ever said.
They were indeed genius in certain areas of knowledge, this doesn't mean they were infallible about every ting, and doesn't exclude the hypothesis that compatibility of Science and Religion (in particular resolving the uncountable contradictions between the two) may still just be the result of a very well partitioned brain, unable to understand whether it's applying a double standard or not.
Nonetheless, I agree with people who say that atheism is not the key, Atheism is just the default, logical conclusion of a reasonable mind, the key to free your mind is not Atheism, and the thing that is holding our brains is not Religion, if you take away Religion from unreasonable people, they will just fill the hole with something else, the problem is Faith Based Reasoning, and the answer is Evidence Based Reasoning, that's all that needs to be said, the "default" tolerance of everybody's world-view, and the idea that any idea should be respected and beyond criticism is just bullshit, and is not a liberal principle, but just moral cowardice and intellectual laziness from people not enough interested to understand the implications of one's ideas.
But if anybody can give me ONE single example and prove me wrong about the fact that Faith is an unreliable method to understand reality and get to the truth as opposed to Reason, I'm here waiting.
-Leonardo da Vinci-
"Thus you may multiply each stone 4 times & no more for they will then become oyles shining in ye dark and fit for magicall uses. You may ferment them with [gold] and [silver], by keeping the stone and metal in fusion together for a day, & then project upon metalls. This is the multiplication of ye stone in vertue. To multiply it in weight ad to it of ye first Gold whether philosophic or vulgar."
-Sir Isaac Newton-
Today I've watched a theological debate in a facebook page that usually doesn't talk about religion, which is a good way to have a look at what random people think about the topic, for some reason a guy posted the following image:
What followed is a typical example of an argument among people who are generally not well informed about the topic they are talking about, regardless of the side they are taking.
So here it comes the guy saying that the poster was wrong, and the other guy saying that religion is poison and so on, but one thing appeared to be common to both sides: a complete lack of arguments.
The thing that troubled me the most is this comment: "i don't give shit about what you believe in , live your life and let other people live in way they like it"
That's the kind of bullshit dogma that most of today's so called "liberals" seem to live by, and one of their main reasons for pride.
This is the kind of guy who wants to picture himself as a super-partes defender of the offended and upset.
First of all, he doesn't give any reason why one should not criticize this or that idea or belief. Secondly, an appropriate answer to the offended people could simply be the glorious quote by Stephen Fry "Are you offended? so fucking WHAT?".
The moment you say that everybody should be free to see the world the way they like, is when you stop having the right to criticize fundamentalism and barbaric practices like the genital mutilations, the stoning of adulteress, the suicide bombings, the oppression of homosexuals and the raping of children (no, I'm not talking about priests, I'm talking about children marriage in Islamic countries).
There is no self-corrective mechanism to interpret the holy books, the different interpretations are not based on the text itself, but rather on the zeitgeist flowing through the society in this or that particular geographic area, in this or that particular time.
If moderates are entitled to hold their beliefs, just because they've been watered down by humanistic principles, regardless of how silly they are, the same should be done for all those who have a different interpretation, including fundamentalists.
Fortunately, humans CAN understand that bronze age mithology is not a good source of ethics, and in practice, they don't use it, most of them just don't want to admit it because they invested a lot on the idea of a creator, and they prefer to distort reality and bend over backwards to find a suitable interpretation of the books rather than being open to the possibility of being wrong, mostly, I think, because of pride.
This is of course the old, flawed, argument for authority and has been thoroughly exposed to all of its fallacies, but since it's a recurrent "argument", I think it's worth spenting a few words on this.
Leonardo (just like Galileo and Newton and many others) was religious because religion was the only way to explain most things back in his times, this doesn't mean that his ideas spawned from the bible or that he would be religious if he lived today, his ideas were so profoundly spectacular exactly because they were achieved despite the lack of knowledge about physics and science in general back in his times, and why was that so? Because we had not invented Science yet and Faith was the only (flawed) epistemology available back then.
We know plenty of things about the famous discoveries of Newton, because they work, we know much less about the fact that Newton was also an alchemist trying to find a way to turn metal into Gold, we don't consider all of Newton's Theories valid because Newton was a genious, that's not enough, and that's why we don't consider his ideas on alchemy legit. If the genious of those people was enough to justify religion, it appears to me it would have to be the same for everything else those people have ever said.
They were indeed genius in certain areas of knowledge, this doesn't mean they were infallible about every ting, and doesn't exclude the hypothesis that compatibility of Science and Religion (in particular resolving the uncountable contradictions between the two) may still just be the result of a very well partitioned brain, unable to understand whether it's applying a double standard or not.
Nonetheless, I agree with people who say that atheism is not the key, Atheism is just the default, logical conclusion of a reasonable mind, the key to free your mind is not Atheism, and the thing that is holding our brains is not Religion, if you take away Religion from unreasonable people, they will just fill the hole with something else, the problem is Faith Based Reasoning, and the answer is Evidence Based Reasoning, that's all that needs to be said, the "default" tolerance of everybody's world-view, and the idea that any idea should be respected and beyond criticism is just bullshit, and is not a liberal principle, but just moral cowardice and intellectual laziness from people not enough interested to understand the implications of one's ideas.
But if anybody can give me ONE single example and prove me wrong about the fact that Faith is an unreliable method to understand reality and get to the truth as opposed to Reason, I'm here waiting.
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