User:Silence/PassionInfinity

Atheism and logic

This is a continuation of the conversation from Talk:Atheism#Atheism_and_Logic:

First of all, please don't waste your time if you really think this dicussion is.

S: Could you please explain to me what this line is in reference to so I can respond?

I mean if you really think you are wasting time by discussing this with me, then stop doing this.

S: Oh, I see. OK, I'll stop as soon as I think this is a waste of time.

PI: You said you are enjoying this! Good for me and you!

Secondly, by "Logis is Flawed", I meant that if you stick to logic only, it results in lots of Paradoxes.

S: First, I'm not sure what you mean by "logic only"; that sounds to me like criticizing a person who eats for "sticking to food only"; there's certainly more than logical discourse that we do, but we make use of logic because it's a valuable tool for helping us understand the world a little better. As for paradoxes, it sounds like you aren't aware that a paradox is not a logical contradiction, it's "A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true: the paradox that standing is more tiring than walking." Paradoxes don't defy logic, they defy our initial expectations in ironic, amusing, and interesting ways. But most importantly, the reason we use logic in communication with each other is—what's the alternative? Logic and critical analysis are the only remotely reliable way we have of determining untrue statements. Without it, we're forced to arbitrarily accept and reject statements without any rhyme or reason at all, just blindly following the masses or authority figures or whoever. And blindly following authorities without critically analyzing their actual statements, as history has taught us, is not a good idea at all.

I never said paradoxes defy logic. What will you call a mathematical or logical proof that leads to a result like 1 = 2 i.e. a conclusion that is always unacceptable? There are many situations where it does happen! Agreed that masses are not always correct but they are not always wrong even!

S: What logical proofs are you referring to? Surely if the logic isn't faulty in leading to an incorrect conclusion, then that means that the premises are? None of this is an attack on logic. If you write the mathematical equation "1+3=5", that doesn't show that mathematics is any less useful, it shows that you can word a statement in a mathematical way without actually adhering to the rules of math. In the same way, you can say something that's untrue in a "logical way", but if it's not sound and valid logic, it's irrelevant.

PI: But still there are many paradoxes in which no apparent flaw is visible. I am not saying that there is no flaw in them. Of course, we will be able to find some flaw in all of the paradoxes some day. Logic as a tool is very acceptable. Later discussion on it later in this reply!

S: OK, it sounds like we agree here. And yes, often paradoxes have no obvious flaw at first, but eventually one always surfaces; for example, Zeno's paradox.

And, exactly: the masses aren't always right, and they aren't always wrong. Noone is! That's why blindly obeying just about anything from any source without first subjecting it to logical and critical analysis is dangerous. And blindly rejecting without critical analysis is almost as bad, too. So, we've got that established.

PI: You know you are rejecting your beliefs. You said there is no ample evidence either way and still openly rejecting the existence of God. Read you last sentence above and justify. That means you have ample of evidence to be an atheist?

S: Why shouldn't I be able to openly reject the existence of God? There's currently no reliable evidence supporting theism, so why should I be agnostic? You see, there's no possible way for atheism's case to be stronger; there are thousands of ways a theist could theoretically supply evidence supporting theism if theism was true, but what evidence could an atheist possibly provide if atheism is true? Would an atheism have to show you a "not-god" entity to convince you? It's simply not possible. I'm an atheist for the same reason that I don't believe in Santa Claus: not because God or Santa Claus are impossible, and not because I hate the concepts of God or Santa Claus or resent people who do believe in them, but because there's not enough evidence to justify belief in them, so the only option available is lack of belief.

PI: You seem to have no sound reason that god does not exist. Well, that is the point that you cannot prove "not-god". Look look, I am taking "lack of belief" as a result that there is no enough evidence. Then why do you call yourself atheist.

• S: What do you mean? I believe that God does not exist because I don't believe that God exists (because of lack of evidence and Occam's Razor). "I don't believe God exists" and "I believe God doesn't exist" are the exact same propositions, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise; the positive/negative debate is just a useless running-in-circles argument that has nothing to do with atheism whatsoever and I'm convinced is a dichotomy invented by theists to distract and waste the time of atheists and prevent them from having real discussions on anything. :) Important distinctions include whether you think the burden of proof is on theism or atheism (it's on theism), whether you think gods definitely exist or don't exist or it's possible that either is true (both are possible), etc. There is next to no difference between "I don't believe Santa Claus exists" and "I believe that Santa Claus doesn't exist"; atheism works exactly the same way. They're just two ways of saying the exact same idea. As long as it's explicit atheism, the distinction is largely a waste of time. I'll finish responding to this in a bit. -Silence 13:18, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

• • PI: Fine! No comments.

Analyze your last statement yourself. You said "the only option", and that is what I am saying that have you exhaustively checked all other options?

• S: Of course. You insult me by suggesting that I would make my conclusions prior to having spent years and years , and insult me further if you are implying that I'm not also keeping an open mind to all future evidence in case my current beliefs about atheism are shown to be incorrect. But I have the same open mind for all kinds of evidence, including evidence of magical unicorns and Santa Claus. Theism merits no special treatment, and especially not specific forms of theism.

• • PI: Fine! Nothing to comment.

Afterall, you are denying something that is believed by more than 90% of the world population. I think it should be 98%.

• S: Argumentum ad populum. How many people believe in something has nothing to do with how true it is, especially when the belief is more comfortable and convenient for many people than the lack of belief (i.e., God's existence is made less likely in an interesting way by the simple fact that if God didn't exist, we would still have invented him and believe devoutly in him). When 98% of the population believed of Europe that the sun revolved around the earth, did that mean that the sun revolved around the earth? Of course not. You're wasting your time by suggesting that I conform to completely arbitrary and extraordinarily unlikely conclusions just because they're popular among the uneducated masses.

• • PI: Even if I am able to prove the existence of God logically, it will be called a paradox because the conclusion is however unacceptable to you whatever the case.

• • • S: No, if you proved the existence of God logically, I'd believe in God. No one has managed to do that in thousands of years of history, so it's safe to say that it's highly unlikely that such a thing will ever happen, though if it does I'll keep an open mind about it.

• • • • PI: Yes. Good! I told you it is impossible to prove. I am discussing this below where you responded to that miracle question. I hope you won't mind.

• • • • • S: It is not impossible to prove within reasonable doubt that God exists. It is impossible to prove 100%, absolutely certainly that God (or anything else) exists.

• • No religion tends to prove the existence of God because it does not need to.

• • • S: Exactly. Religions are not, by and large, rational, logical, scientific, or reasonable. They rely on authoritarianism, dogmatism, threats, rhetoric, and peer pressure to sway the masses. This is a major point against them, not a point for them; believing in something you have no reason to believe in doesn't make it more likely that your belief is right, it makes it less likely, no matter how many people also believe in the same thing for no reason. Get it?

• • • • PI: Look look man! Religions usually come on certain group of people. I am talking about the revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The intended cause for this is to correct their beliefs and not to prove something. I recommend you to read something about the history of these religions in chronological order. That would certainly help me. Related to same topic as miracles.

• • • • • S: So, many religions also have racist undertones in them. Why do you keep bringing up negative aspects of religions as though they were positive?
        • And, I've already read plenty of things on the history of those three religions, particularly on Judaism and Christianity. If you have any specific (not excessively long) texts you think I should read, and a way for me to gain easy access to them, I'll give them a shot, but just saying "read stuff about X topic" is a totally unrealistic demand, and a tactic designed to allay responsibility for the debate by trying to get me to go off on a quest for something before I can continue the conversation. Not going to work on me. If you think certain points are that important, why can't you just explain them yourself? I've read plenty of stuff too, but I'm not telling you to go read it, because I feel that I can explain it to you myself, and hopefully you'll read it in this conversation if I do. However, if you want anything to read, for starters Why I Am Not a Christian is a nice little essay.

• • Human kind knows it right from the very beginning till the end.

• • • S: No, plenty of humans don't believe in god, and plenty haven't throughout all of human history. The only reason God is such a popular concept isn't because God is real, it's because it's an extension of a paradigm humans are already quite familiar with: the parent/child relationship. Humans understand this relationship, they all live through it, having to blindly obey and listen to an authority figure who they assume to be perfecct. So it's natural that, upon reaching adulthood, many people feel confused and lost without any more authority figures to blindly obey and make this complicated and beautiful world seem simpler and plainer than really it is. So they invented God, a supreme authority figure, as a crutch to lean on, as a way to explain things they didn't understood, as a way to compel others to doing what they wanted through threats of divine curses and damnation.

• • • • PI: To keep morality may be. To keep people in track!

• • • • • S: The problem is that most religions have had a rather skewed understanding of morality, so they've really "kept people in check" in ways they they shouldn't be "kept in check", and didn't keep people in check in other, much more important ways. Which makes sense, because any source of morality that relies on authoritarianism, as many religions do, is immoral, and just plain stupid. Morality is much easier to explain and relate through logical, rational explanations than through threats, scare tactics, and force.

• • • That is why God is such a common concept: it's so convenient to believe in, even if it has no bearing on reality. But it's a common concept, not a universal one. It's debatable whether the multiple-gods of many Pagan religions have any remote similarity to the almighty-creator-God people typically think of when they use the word; likewise, many Eastern spiritualities have no "God" or "gods" concept whatsoever.

• • • • PI:It is so convenient because you already know it! Man has already attempted a lot of times making a complete system of life like Karl Marx. They have been unsuccessful. They seem successful but contains a lot of flaws. Would you believe that there is a divine system of life provided by God Himself? I can bet you won't. There are miracles but you can't see them.

• • • • • S: Wrong. It's "convenient" because it's a comfortable idea, one that gives people a false sense of security, gives them a skewed idea of the world. It's very akin to the belief that all politicians (or any one politician or party, for that matter) are perfect and never do anything wrong. It might make you happier and less stressed, but it will also make you deluded and make you less able to do good deeds and help your fellow man, to fight injustice and corruption and ensure that lives are not needlessly lost. That is the danger of blind belief without any logic or evidence to support it.
        • S: You are also incorrect in saying that man has attempted to make complete systems of life lots of times and always failed. Communism failed, but does that mean that every non-religious belief system has failed? Obviously not: secular humanism has proven itself time and time again to be a magnificently useful, high-quality, life-saving belief system, and has only grown more and more influential over the centuries.
        • S: And, again, the idea of "miracles" is self-contradictory and totally inconsistent. The laws of nature are not written laws, but descriptions of the way things are, and therefore they cannot be violated any more than a room can be violated by something entering it that was not in the room at the time a drawing of it was made: the drawing can turn out to be inaccurate if the room turns out to not be the way it seemed to be at the time it was drawn, or if some new thing enters the room, and in response we can make a new drawing of the room as we currently understand it. However, the room itself is still the room, and never changes being the room, no matter how accurately or inaccurately we draw it, and no matter whether new factors enter the room or not.

• • I kept it pending but let me state it now. Unconscious mind contains a lot of information by birth.

• • • S: Sure. They're called instincts. They're genetic predispositions to certain behaviors that have proven to be extraordinarily useful towards survival.

• • • • PI:What was the point splitting here. I knew this!

• • • • • S: You didn't sound like you did. You didn't sound like you had even the remotest understanding of instincts and why and how they exist, to assume something like "people inherently believe in God from birth" without any justification, logic, or evidence. Theism does not increase one's likelihood of surviving and reproducing, therefore theism has nothing to do with evolution or instinctive behavior.

• • Search for it on the iternet and you will be able to find a lot. You know a female image by birth regardless of whether you have seen it or not ever in your life. In the same way, the concept of God is inbuilt into your mind.

• • • S: Patent nonsense. The concept of "God" is no more inbuilt into your mind than the concept of karma, or the concept of the soul, or the concept of leprechauns. I'm sure you could find plenty of evidence supporting your claim that humans instinctively recognize female figures, but I doubt you could find a single scrap of evidence for the idea that babies are theists. Babies are nontheists. Theism is taught (or learned through experience), not born into, just like pretty much all philosophies. The source of your confusion on this matter is that you are extending the fact that babies instinctively look up to a higher power (their parents) and learn to love and obey this authority, to also apply to a completely abstract concept: God. Pure delusion. You could use the exact same reasoning to prove that humans naturally, by birth, prefer to live in tyrannical totalitarian dictatorships, because blindly obeying an "all-powerful" leader is nothing but an extension of how babies must obey and look up to their parents without thought. Both extensions of the child/parent dangerous slippery slopes. There's a reason humans grow up: they're supposed to stop blindly obeying anything and start thinking and analyzing things for themselves. That's why humans aren't ants, and that's why humans have the capacity to reason, judge, and think critically.

• • • • PI:Prejudiced comments.

• • • • • S: Blatant evasion of all my points through quasi-ad hominem and obviously false (and about as meaningless as saying "that's just your POV!"; everyone has a POV, but some POVs are right and some aren't) representations of my comments as being "prejudiced", without any explanation of how or why they are prejudiced, and certainly without any support for this extremely pointed accusation. Until you provide some support for the accusation, it must be assumed that you are simply incapable of replying to the well-established scientific facts and theories I have mentioned above, and are trying to use rhetoric to avoid talking about it.

• • What happened to this concept is that you unconsciously pushed it so deep inside your unconscious mind that it has not become impossible for you to retrieve that concept.

• • • S: No, what happened to me is that I was born a weak atheist/nontheist (i.e. lacking belief in theism), grew up and learned about God from the people around me, all of whom believed in him, assumed that everyone around me was correct in their assumptions because they were so often right on many other things, and went along with the crowd to believe in theism too for many years. Throughout this entire time, I never felt any reality of a thing called "God", but I continued to not want to go against the flow (theism is often the path of least resistance, for societal reasons) or cause trouble with my community, and continued to even though I never felt any sort of connection with a deity or any evidence that one need exist, just a lot of people all around me spending hours and hours trying to brainwash me into accepting their theistic dogma. Finally, as I began thinking for myself and questioning my own assumptions much more fully, examining my own belief structure carefully to spot where I might have made any errors in judgment, I came upon my rather shapeless and generic beliefs in the supernatural (a state of affairs which is becoming increasingly common nowadays; people are loathe to abandon their comforting, abstract notions of a universal father-figure somewhere out there, but are becoming less religious and assigning fewer specific traits to this being), analyzed them carefully, read up on a large number of the major opinions on theism throughout the history of civilization, and finally came to the conclusion that theism very likely isn't true at all. Since then, I've continued to gather evidence and information on the topic so as to further clarify and test my current stance, and each new has only added to the likelihood that deities do not, in fact, exist. This does not mean that I'm certain they don't; but I'm certain enough to act as though they don't for as long as no contradictory evidence arises. So. That's where I am.

• • • • PI:Even stronger belief. I don't agree simply because it did not happen to me. I was born theist, taught theism and am now a strong monotheist.

• • • • • S: You were certainly not born theist, but because you were raised theist, you have now been thoroughly indoctrinated and believe such totally unsupported hypotheses as "theism is inherent" because it's an effective method (i.e. "cheap tactic") of supporting your belief without having to sink so low as to actually provide evidence or reasoning for why you think as you do—beliefs which have even less of a scientific standing than the typical urban legend, to help put things in perspective. (Less because at least most urban legends are hypothetically possible with our understanding of science and human biology, whereas "theism is inherent" contradicts entire well-established fields of thought.)
        • Also, you would do well to stop replying to my points wit "that's just a belief" or "that's prejudiced" or totally ridiculous and meaningless statements like that. Everything in this conversation is a belief and everything is succeptible to our individual prejudices, but neither of those facts has anything whatsoever to do with the content of our beliefs—there's nothing in the definition of the word "belief" that suggests that some beliefs can't be much more accurate and valid than others. You might just as well respond to my arguments with "You're wrong because you're ugly!", because it would be equally as effective, and as long as you're going to use totally nonsensical arguments, you might as well amuse me in the process.

• • Don't argue this way that I don't see any such concept within me because this is already discussed. Therefore, I don't need to prove this thing.

• • • S: Hm? Where was this discussed? And if I already explained very clearly to you that I don't have this secret-theism hidden within me, then don't you need to provide evidence for the contrary if you're going to convince anyone at all of anything? After all, I know myself ten thousand times better than you know me. You assume that I must have been born with theistic beliefs just because you have strong theistic beliefs. What intense egomania you have, to assume that everyone else in the world is exactly like you.

• • • • PI:You cannot provide evidence for a lot of things. You cannot prove that your mind exists. I don't see any. Don't take it literally as an insult!

• • • • • S: Of course you can. You can provide evidence of some sort for just about every reliable bit of information humans have. I can't prove beyond all doubt that my mind exists, but I can prove beyond reasonable doubt (which is the only requirement) that it exists by demonstrating the reactions of chemical processes within my head as I perform various actions and speak various words, discuss concepts and decipher and utilize symbols and tools, such as language.

• • You are now here to claim something that is totally created by you. It is already an established fact.

• • • S: What is an established fact? There is nothing established about the nonsensical, widely-contested, and deeply ungrounded in evidence notion that babies are born as theists. You're the one who's creating new, complex theories here; I'm merely showing you a proper degree of skepticism to try (and apparently fail) to keep you somewhat grounded in reality and not diverging entirely into the abstract and rhetorical.

• • • • PI:Not that abstract and rhetorical!

• • • • • S: Regardless of how abstract and rhetorical it is, it's still false. Quit ignoring the meat of my arguments and picking at the side-dishes instead; it's cowardly, if you can't or won't respond to certain points, at least say that instead of acting like you're replying when you're really just nitpicking word choice and disputing the exact degree to which something abstract and rhetorical is abstract and rhetorical. Oy.

• • Denying the existence of God will of course take you to a level (mental or whatever) much below animals.

• • • S: Nonsense (and an amazingly bigoted and prejudiced attitude, considering that you just called every explicit atheist in the world "below animals"; shades of antisemitism?). Believing in the ultimate, supreme authority of a certain being you have absolutely no reason to believe exists (other than that it feels comforting to believe so; ignoring reality often does) and following its commands like a robot is, if anything, what will lower your intellectual level, by turning you from a thinking, rational being into a zombie slave.

• • • • PI:You mean to say that a person believing God is not more than zombie slave?

• • • • • S: Straw man fallacy. Read what I said, not what you wish I'd said; "zombie slave" was just a metaphor to explain why it's bad to blindly worship and authoritarianistic deity, just as "robot" was. Also, not everyone who believes that god exists believes in blindly worshiping and obeying that god; you seem to, however.

• • • • Sorry to say, but a person not believing in God is totally puposeless and pathetic.

• • • • • S: Even if that's true (which I'd heavily contest, as it's quite offensive, baseless, and subjective), such a person is less purposeless and pathetic than someone who does believe in and blindly obey a God. He's just not deluded into thinking he's more purposeful and important than he really is. That's just common sense and practicality, nothing less or more.

• • • • May be a slave is much better than a purposeless creature grazing all over the world.

• • • • • S: No. Being a slave is much worse than not being a slave. And since you seem to think that the only alternative to being a slave is aimlessly "grazing all over the world"—I'll take the grazing. Better to not have a single, defined, required "purpose" than to have to waste one's whole life on an ultimately meaningless and arbitrary objective.

• • • • At least have some destination that may be hypothetical for you (but that doesn't matter).

• • • • • S: Why? The destination is not important. The journey is. The destination is the end, the conclusion, it's boring and stale and obvious and goes nowhere. When you're at the destination, everything is over and wasted and gone, and you are trapped and absolutely over. Why spend your entire life obsessing over the inevitable, rather than truly appreciating and valuing life as it goes by? Why fixate on death, which will inescapably come in due time anyway, when there's so much glorious life to love and experience in the meantime?
        • What's so great about destinations? What's so magical about cessation of functioning, that it could ever in a million years rival the functioning itself?

• • This is exactly why you can't see any difference between you and an animal (both completely purposeless).

• • • S: One of the most blatant and ridiculous strawmen I have ever had the privilege of seeing in my entire life. You claim that I don't see a difference between myself and a non-human animal, when I already listed several major differences between them (whereas you failed to list even one!)?! Laughably absurd. And once again, you fail to realize that humans are a type of animal!!! But that doesn't mean that we're exactly like all other animals, any more than spiders being a type of animal mean that spiders are just like all other animals. Please stop with the extremist over-generalizations and actually respond to what I said, not to what you wish I'd said for the sake of your arguments.

• • • • PI:Very good! Humans are animals biologically, may be psychologically, physiologically, intrinsically and whatever ...caly ...cally. They are spirtually different. To feel that you will have to leave this materialistic finite world with a finite duration (of life) and feel higher realms.

• • • • • S: You haven't even defined what "intrinsically" means. What's "intrisic" about any of this? And we're only animals psychologically and physiologically because we're animals in every aspect, but our psychology and phsyiology are both very unlike all other animals. Get it yet?! If not, read a dictionary and figure out that humans are animals.
        • S: Also, spirituality doesn't exist any more than god does. If you are going to introduce imaginary new concepts, please take the time to define them all lest they not be taken seriously any more than if I started introducing "baiojfa" or "t3it9j" into the argument to help support my claims. The closest real thing to "spirituality" is "emotion", as especially powerful and compelling emotions are often mistaken for "spiritual" feelings, based on the long-standing egomaniacal human assumption that we must have some special, magical essence within ourselves to give us life. Some sort of "soul" or "spirit", ethereal and strange, to fuel our existence—all of which is based on millennia of total human ignorance to anatomy and how and why we really work, and is thus a totally extraneous belief now that we can understand why and how we live with science, just as belief in gods is no longer necessary now that we can understand the natural world quite well indeed. We don't need God anymore to create the universe or life any more than we need Zeus to create the thunder or Aetna to cause volcanic eruptions; all have scientific explanations.

• • They have instincts and you have intelligence, what is the big deal?

• • • S: You tell me. You're the one who can't seem to get over it, yet fail to make any real points concerning it. Why does the existence of animals trouble you so?

• • • • PI:They don't trouble me at all. They let me appreciate the beauties of nature and also recognize God. This world is full of evidences but only for wise people. (not a taunt BTW)

• • • • • S: Certainly sounds like a taunt. If it's not, then it's just an outright insult. "Only wise people can believe in God, so you probably aren't wise." Again, only an egomaniac would assume that his beliefs are inherently linked to "wisdom", without anything to back such a belief up except his own conviction. Every evil person throughout history has had conviction aplenty. Conviction is never an assurance of rightness: only rational, balanced justification can be.
        • And, of course, I appreciate the beauty of nature, the world, and mankind perfectly well, and don't believe in God. By listing all those together, you're once again trying to pull a rhetorical tactic by suggesting that loving the world and theism are linked. They're not. Though since some would say "love is blind", and theism is certainly blind (and deaf, and dumb, and ignorant), there may be some connection there...

• • In order to define the purpose of life existence of God is a must.

• • • S: Unless life gives itself purpose. And, of course, you have absolutely no basis for your assumption that life needs to have a purpose at all; the same argument against life having a "use" also applies to life having a "purpose" or a "meaning" outside of itself. After days and days of this conversation, you still have yet to do the most basic groundwork necessary to at all support your argument. That is, clearly and specifically explaining how you personally define "God", explaining why you think that life must have a "purpose" or a "use", etc. Instead, you're just trying to sway me to your side by phrasing your opinions as though they were facts. Thoroughly unconvincing, I'm afraid.

• • • • PI: Even if you put me one million question that I am unable to answer, it would not prove the nonexistence of God.

• • • • • S: I don't need to prove the nonexistence of God. You need to prove the existence of God. The default scientific stance is nontheism because theism adds an additional entity to the equation and thus must be able to explain some phenomena that is not otherwise, more simply and with higher likelihood explainable, in accordance with Occam's Razor. And, in fact, the very fact that I can't prove God's nonexistence shows why it's so obviously necessarily for you to prove his existence, if anything; unless you can, we must assume nonexistence because that's the only way it's possible to have the evidence weighing in favor of nontheism: by not having evidence in favor of theism. The same applies to believe in Santa Claus, or believe that Batman exists: there's no way to prove that either one doesn't exist, so we don't believe that they don't exist because we have proof that they don't, we believe because we don't have any evidence that they do exist. God is exactly the same.

• • • • How can I prove this life has a purpose if you just can't realize it yourself?

• • • • • S: By showing me evidence and reasoning that suggests that this life has a purpose? By providing examples of things that support your hypothesis about life having a purpose, properly analyzing this evidence, and giving compelling, reasoned arguments about the many ways the world having meaning makes perfect sense with our current understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and likewise by making arguments showing how the world being meaningless is unlikely, or even impossible, based on the evidence and observations available. That's how. It's actually pretty easy, assuming you do have any real raeson to believe that life has purpose, and aren't just trying to delude yourself or making massive, unlikely, unjustified assumptions. Oh, and again, the first step is always to define your terminology: begin your presentation of evidence and reasoning for the meaningfulness of it all by explaining in detail how you define "meaning", "God", "existence", etc. Otherwise we'll end up debating technicalities rather than focusing on the really important stuff.

• • You are so strict on your belief that it os now next to impossible to convince you otherwise.

• • • S: I'm no more strict on my lack of belief in theism than I am on my lack of belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. I'm 100% open and willing to believe in any of these concepts if enough evidence arises to support them. But none has yet, so why do you keep accusing me of being impossible to convince? Maybe the reason you're having so much trouble convincing me is because you have no reason to believe in God yourself. And, of course, the ultimate hypocrisy: you repeatedly accuse me of being too strictly nontheistic to believe in God, and at the exact same time you are completely and utterly closed to the possibility that there is no God. Open-mindedness works both ways. If you won't consider my viewpoint on at least equal ground with yours until you are able to provide contradictory evidence or reasoning to it, then I may soon stop giving you the same privilege.

• • • • PI: Hm. I told you why I believe in God. That is inbuilt in nature.

• • • • • S: If it was inbuilt in nature, everyone would be a theist, and atheism and nontheism would not exist. Since atheism and nontheism exist, theism is not inherent, and you must justify it.
        • S: Furthermore, that theism is "inbuilt in nature" is not an argument for theism! If racism was "inbuilt in nature", would that mean that we should all be racists? Because it's natural? Of course not. Something natural can be bad and horrible and destructive just as easily as it can be good and healthy and helpful. So, you certainly need to provide much better justification for your belief than that it's "inbuilt in nature"; not only is such a statement clearly and thoroughly untrue, but even if it wasn't, it would do absolutely nothing to support your argument, as something "being natural" does not justify believing in it if that natural thing causes unnecessary harm and destruction. In the same way, something being "unnatural" does not necessarily make it bad, if it causes great good regardless.

• • • • I will not be called a human being if I cease believing it.

• • • • • S: Of course you will. Read the article on human; it says nowhere that belief in God is a requirement for being human. In fact, it doesn't even say that it's a significant aspect of being human, any more than belief in Santa Claus is. So quit being a drama queen and provide actual justification, actual evidence, not misdefinitions of terms intended to confuse and obscure the points being discussed.

• • • • If you can't realize it why are you blaming me that I am wrong without any justification?

• • • • • S: What? I already gave my justification. My justification for "blaming" you for your theism is that theism isn't natural or automatic or inherent, it's something you choose to believe in and could change your mind on anytime you wanted without ceasing to "be called a human being" or anything absurd like that. At the very least admit that your beliefs are beliefs, even if you want to hold them despite all the evidence in the universe; believe something untrue if you want, but at least acknowledge what you're doing, to yourself if noone else.

• • • • You were born weak atheist but I was not born this way. I know myself may be million times more.

• • • • • S: Everyone is born a "weak atheist", a.k.a. "nontheist", because everyone has such an undeveloped, primitive mind at birth, recognizing only the most basic needs and desires, understanding no cosmological or theological comments whatsoever. You're trying to rewrite your own history to conform with your current beliefs, because you want to believe that you've always been a theist, and because you can't remember any time in your life before believing in theism—of course, it's next to impossible to remember anything that happened in your life before the age of three, so making any statements about what you did or didn't believe at the time is pretty ridiculous unless you have some sort of documentation or evidence to support it!

• • A good proof is that even atheists have been recorded to unconsciously utter sentences like May you live long (just an example). To whom are they calling unconsciously?

• • • S: They aren't calling to anyone, they're expressing a wish that you live long. It's no different than saying "Happy Birthday!" or "Long live the king!"; an atheist can say those statements just as well even while understanding that he isn't saying them to anyone. We say those things for social reasons, to express our affection for other people, not because we're actually so deluded as to believe that some magical wish-granter out there is listening and may hear us and grant our wishes! When something bad happens, I often say "god damn it!", but that doesn't mean that I believe in God, it means that I was brought up in a society where that's what almost everyone said when they were angry, so I adopted it too. It has absolutely nothing to do with my beliefs—I've never been a Christian, for example, and yet I commonly yell "jeez!" or "jesus!" when something goes wrong, simply because that's become a common phrase to yell to express anger. What matters is not the form of the words, but the intended meanings. We're intelligent enough to distinguish between someone telling someone who's sneezed "god bless you" because he honestly thinks that sneezing makes one succeptible to evil nose demons and wants to invoke God to protect the person from evil forces, and someone who says "god bless you" because it's the polite, social thing to do, whether God exists or not. We can distinguish between the two. We aren't children. Most of us, anyway.
    • S: Furthermore, trying to argue that atheists believe in theism just because the language they speak is subtly biased in numerous ways toward theism is deeply fallacious. Theists created the language, back when being an atheist would mean horrible torture and execution, and their prejudices and biases have warped the language deeply to reflect their views. The fact that many dictionaries have a definition of atheism as "immorality" or similar shows quite well that this bias is not the result of some sort of magical, universal subconscious theism, but on millennia of persecution, bigotry, hatred, and total closed-mindedness.

• • • • PI: Very nice justification. So you seem to see these unconscious responses (not the wishes) as totally absurd. You don't think what you are uttering.

• • • • • S: Who says these "unconscious responses" even exist? And no, most people don't think about what they're uttering on such a deep level, even unconsciously. People certainly don't take the time to analyze every statement they make as though they were saying it literally; one of the most important and universal aspects of human conversation is that people rarely say what they literally mean. Instead, they rely on idioms, expressions, phrases, etc. to convey what they're trying to say.

• • • • Quite an examined life I must say.

• • • • • S: Pompous bullshit. Nobody thinks about every single thing they ever say on every single level possible. If we did, we'd take two or three days just to say one sentence. Please do get over the Freudian phase of your argument. It's obnoxious, and Freud was a cockprat anyway.

• • • • Thanks for giving me a clue that you do lot of things without thinking and using any tool.

• • • • • S: You do too. You just seem to be incapable of acknowledging that about yourself. That doesn't make you more self-aware than me, it makes you less self-aware than me, since I at least understand myself well enough to know that I don't analyze every single line that I ever say totally literally&mdash.though I do analyze more of those lines in unique ways than pretty much anyone else I know does, if experience is any judge, since I've often baffled and amazed those around me throughout my life with my rather unique and deep analysis of things people say that are usually intended to be taken on only one level... But that's a story for another day, and this is a conversation about human nature and the nature of existence, not about our personal lives
        • An interesting situation, regardless: it's nicely analogous with the theism/nontheism issue, which is similarly a matter of you assuming that nontheists are worse off because of their lack of a specific belief you have, when you're actually just less aware of the way the universe works as a result of your own belief. One of the most treasured maxims I hold to is: Ignorance is not bliss. If you can remember that, it will serve you very well indeed.

• • God cannot be proved scientifically using five senses. They are even more limited that human imagination.

• • • S: Everything is limited. The senses and human imagination are both limited. But the senses do provide a better understanding of how the world really is than the imagination does; the imagination just tells us what is already in our heads, it doesn't add anything new to our heads, as observation does.

• • • • PI: There are still more sources for knowledge apart from these senses.

• • • • • S: I never said there weren't. You should use both your senses and your imagination, and neglect neither one. You sounded with your above statement like you were rebuking the senses ("They are even more limited that human imagination"), which is a terribly poor thing to say. Without your senses, just about everything you love in this world would be totally unavailable to you. What a horrible life.

• • • • Senses sense material world not spirtual realm.

• • • • • S: There is no spiritual realm. It's a made up place, like Candyland, that people use as an excuse to hide from the real world and give them an over-inflated sense of self-importance. It's a lot like God that way.

• • All this has to do is to realize yourself within your mind the existence of some deity.

• • • S: Only there isn't. So why would I want to try to convince myself of something that isn't true? Sounds like a waste of time and energy when I could be trying to help make the world a better place by helping my fellow man achieve greater happiness. What's the point of lying to myself?

• • Here lies the laws of universe, morality and purpose of this life and all other questions.

• • • S: Nonsense. None of those things exist within the human mind by nature, though they can come to be understood to some extent in the human mind if we observe and analyze the world around us for long enough. Introspection is an important way to help sort out internal issues, but it's not everything, and it doesn't provide us with much-needed external stimuli and information.

• • • • PI: Who told you they don't? Don't use deductive knowledge only. Use inductive knowledge!

• • • • • S: It doesn't. And I do use both, when I need to. But inductive knowledge is infinitely less reliable; don't you know that? It's touching a fire and getting burned and saying "all fire is hot", whereas deductive knowledge is finding out that all fire is hot and then saying "this fire in my fireplace is hot". While both have their place, it's a thousand times easier to incorrectly use inductive reasoning than deductive reasoning. Read up on deductive reasoning and induction (philosophy).

• • One more thing: Can you give me any example of a company, industry, factory, organization and any system that is going on perfectly without any management staff?

• • • S: The universe is not a company, industry, factor, or organization, needing a manager. The universe is not a watch, needing a watchmaker. The universe is not a house, needing an architect. The universe is the universe, and analogies do not an argument make. You can make an analogy of anything to anything else ("Have you ever seen a human spin a web? No? Then obviously spiders don't spin webs either!"), but it won't support your argument.

• • • • PI: You mean to say that Eiffel tower resulted from an explosion? Now I have the previlege to see something that silly ever in my life.

• • • • • S: The universe is not the Eiffel tower. The universe is the universe, and analogies do not an argument make.
        • S: Alternate response: "You mean to say that this flower grew from a seed, rather than being designed by an architect and built by engineers and construction crews like the Eiffel Tower was?! What a moron you are!" Everything is not analogous. Give me a reason to consider your analogy valid, rather than just assuming that I'll take everything you say as beautiful logic, as perfect gospel.

• • How absurd it would be!

• • • S: That ultimate Narcissism of humankind: the baseless assumption that the universe has to conform to human expectations, human standards, human paradigms, human relationships, has to be directly analogous to how we live our lives, has to conform to the power and dominance of a human-like force, a God that proves how deeply, fundamentally important we humans are on a cosmic sense. Good grief. What profound arrogance.

• • Don't break the paragraphs apart to try to answer one sentence at a time. You destroy the argument this way. Answer one para as a whole. Thanks!

• • • S: Uh, no. Breaking the paragraphs apart is a way to analyze all of your statements, and it's much easier to read than increasingly large and cumbersome fifty-line paragraphs, one after another. Feel free to do the same to me if there are any points you want to respond to buried in one of my paragraphs, as long as you do the same as I did in all of my replies, and also keep the big picture and the overarching argument in mind.
    • S: Admit it: what you really want me to do is not to respond to everything at once, but to blindly obey whatever you said without analyzing your individual claims and assumptions. Are you here to debate, or to proselytize?

I am not taking into account monotheism and polytheism as well as agnosticism. Agnostics are safer and cannot be counted towards atheists.

• S: What do you mean? Numerous definitions of atheism do include agnosticism as a form of atheism, and there is, obviously, a very popular belief called agnostic atheism. Since everyone must either be a theist or a nontheist, agnostics must obviously be one or the other as well, and one of the common definitions of atheism is, in fact, nontheism. -Silence 15:25, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

• • PI: No comments

• • • S: More evasion. Agnostics can and are counted as atheists by many groups.

• • PI: Please copy this on my talk page because It seems you think you are wasting your time by discussing this? PassionInfinity 04:22, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

• • • S: No, I just have been extraordinarily busy lately, so I haven't had time to finish responding to what you said above. Why do you keep repeatedly suggesting that I think this conversation is a waste of time? You also haven't responded to anything I said below; not that I expected you to, since I haven't finished replying to your points yet (I'll do that now), but I hope you will when I'm done. -Silence 05:43, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

• • PI: It took so long that is why I said so. Fine now.

Ec5618 is quite right althogh not perfect. Logic can be used to prove the existence of God as well as the non-existence of God!

S: Incorrect. Logic can neither be used to prove the existence of God nor to prove the nonexistence of God. Logically speaking, God may either exist or not exist—the nature of human perception and existence renders certainty about almost any subject impossible, so to say "God definitely exists" or "God definitely doesn't exist" is fundamentally irrational. What may be rational, on the other hand, is to say "God almost definitely doesn't exist", depending on how you interpret the evidence in question. But regardless, you seem to be confusing "logic" for "arguments"; that there are arguments for both sides of a dispute does not necessarily mean that each side's (or even either side's) arguments are valid.

Well, What will you call the teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments that prove the existence of God? One of which is always considered a paradox. And how do you deny the existence of God, you know better. You better call yourself an agnostic because your position is not of a strict atheist.

S: The teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments are all heavily flawed, and thus they do not "prove the existence of God". I've gone into great detail picking apart those arguments on every level, and many of them have over a half-dozen major logical fallacies and rhetorical trickery buried within their seemingly reasonable facade. If you want me to explain to you why those arguments are completely without merit, give me any specific aspect of any of those arguments and I'll gladly show you where they are at best lacking, and at worst downright deceptive and dishonest (i.e., with so many unstated assumptions).

PI: I never said they are perfect. These were just examples. If you like, I am only interested in ontological argument. Don't copy arguments from Immanuel Kant. :)

S: OK. I'll write up an explanation of the ontological argument's many problems when I'm home.

PI: Waiting!

And I am not an agnostic, except in the sense that I do not think that anything is definitely true or untrue in existence (except, arguably things which are thus by definition, i.e. math equations and statements like "This is a statement"); if that's "agnostic", then everyone who isn't a complete lunatic must be agnostic, so the term isn't very useful anyway. I tend to use "agnostic" more to mean people who think that there isn't yet enough evidence to determine to a reasonable degree whether or not God exists, and since I believe that there is more than enough evidence to determine to a reasonable extent whether God exists, I'm not agnostic in the typical sense. Even if your definition of "agnosticism" does include me, though, that still doesn't mean I'm not an atheist; if your definition of agnosticism is that broad, then if anything, I'm an agnostic atheist.

PI: Agnostic atheist! Wow a new term. I suppose it means an agnostic that is inclined towards atheism. Or else an atheist who is still dangling between atheism and agnosticism. I am enjoying this discussion a lot. Really! I wished I could ever talk to an atheist directly. Remember that this universe has the tendency to prove (prove is inappropriate... I think better would be inclination) both the arguments. I will talk about it later because the topic will be become broader then. Keep it pending!

S: Agnostic atheism isn't a new term, there's even an article for it already: agnostic atheism. It generally means somenoe who lacks belief in god, but is unconvinced one way or the other on whether or not god exists. That definition of the term doesn't apply to me, though. And I'm unsure what you mean by "this universe has the tendency to prove both the arguments"... do you mean it has the capacity? I'd agree with that if you're defining "prove" as "make very sure", not "make completely, 100% sure".

PI: Agreed! Not hundred percent sure. Of course, somethingsa are left on our discretion as well. You have closed all the doors to you own inner reality.

• S: No, I've not closed any doors. I've just marked the empty rooms as I've passed them by, so that I am able to more easily distinguish between rooms that appear to be full of new and wonderful things, and rooms that don't. I don't assume that the rooms will be empty forever, but until I have reason to believe otherwise, I will focus on the doors leading somewhere I find interesting, compelling, and real.

• • PI: Lets see how true are you in this claim of yours!

• • • S: What do you mean by that?

By that I mean you have not yet realized who you are and why are you here. Since you are so bent upon proving yourself an atheist, it would be very hard for someone to let you peek inside your own self and to convince you otherwise.

• S: Why do I have to be "bent upon proving" myself to be an atheist? Do you have to be "bent upon proving" your theism to be a theist? Everyone believes things in his own ways. What is indisputable is that the scientific burden of proof is on theism to prove its claims, and that nontheism is the default rational stance. This does not mean that everyone has to ; if humans were completely rational, this world would be a very boring place. But certainly some people have to keep their eyes open to the world around them, and I've decided to make myself one of those people in order to better serve my fellow man. Anyone who wishes to convince me can attempt to do so, and I will listen to, consider, and respond to their arguments honestly and with as open a mind as anyone can manage. But being open-minded isn't the same thing as blindly obeying whatever anyone else tells me is true. I won't accept what you say just because you say it; you have to give me a reason to believe you if you want me to believe you. Poetry and rhetoric alone won't do the job. Though it might entertain me, at least.

• • PI: Even you are entertaining me this way really. I usually smile reading your arguments. Believe me! Rationality and thinking and keeping eyes open- all entertaining in the sense that you don't knowand try to be very logical!

• • • S: I'm glad I'm entertaining you, but something being funny doesn't make it any less true.

• • • • PI: So?

• • • • • S: So everything I said above is true, and until you provide some sort of argument against its being true (or admit that it, or part of it, is factual), you're just running away from it rather than actually responding to it. I advise you to stop running away from and evading 90% of what I say soon. Running gets tiring after a while.

That is the situation to which there is no cure! By that I mean, even a miracle won't work.

• S: I fail to catch your meaning. Miracles, as usually defined, don't technically exist; if something violates a law of nature, that just means that our current understanding of nature is flawed or incomplete. Everything that exists is a part of the natural, material world.

• • PI: That is what I am saying! Even a miracle won't work. You will start believing that our understaning is flawed. What should work?

• • • S: Are you asking what it would take to make me believe that theism is probably true? Plenty of things. If God himself showed up (which he could easily do if he wanted to and if he exists, so either he must not exist or he must not want us to believe in him; or maybe he just doesn't care), or if he set the sky ablaze with magical flames, or if he commanded all the beasts in the world to preach Biblical passages night and day, all of which should be easily within the power of any omnipotent being, then I'd certainly give theism much more credit. (Though none of those events would be "miracles", they'd just be acts of God.)

• • • • PI: Here we go! Will you really believe in something that is precisely the act of God. Something that is touchable, examinable and beautiful? That would be the most interesting phase. Let me see how open minded were you (your claim). I may present you something that is an act of God, a miracle or act whatever!!!

• • • • • S: But you have yet to do so, and until you do, you're still just BSing me. What I'm thinking is that you're going to eventually give me an amazingly dubious, nonsensical bit of "evidence" in the future and then tell me that if I don't blindly accept it as absolute, infallible, definite proof of the existence of God, I'm an illogical closed-minded buffoon. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. I'll examine any evidence you provide with a completely open mind (I'm perfectly willing to believe in God, you see—I just lack any reason to, just as I lack any reason to believe that Santa Claus exists), but that means I'll examine it critically and, if there are any faults, I'll point them out. And if your evidence doesn't prove what you intend it to prove, I'll point that out too. Just warning you ahead of time. But, of course, I eagerly await your providing real substance at long last, to back up the mountains and mountains of rhetoric you've heaped up in lieu of anything substantial.

• • • • • • PI: I can say that I can answer about 50% of your arguments and questions you have posed but certainly not all. I am extremely sorry that I took a lot of your time but that was not at all useless either for me or for you. At least, I hope so. It will take a lot of time to scroll up and down and to answer all the arguments. Just calm down. I don't need an answer to this paragraph. Writing up one junk is much easier. Again thank a lot for your time you spent although full of personal comments by both sides not to mention who started first. It was at least very useful for me. You taught me a lot at least how to argue beautifully.

• • • • • • • S: Then do 50%, if you're willing. I don't ask for perfection, just the best you can do. And you don't have to apologize for taking my time, any more than I have to apologize for taking yours; we did it because we enjoy talking about these issues, not because we were forced to. And I am already calmed down, I'm sorry if my arguments don't convey that; the way I word things doesn't tend to reflect my emotional state (e.g., if I use lots of italicized or bold text, there's no reason to assume I'm any more agitated than when I use none at all!), it's just the way I see as being best for conveying intended word emphasis and so on.

• • • • • • Let me tell you few things that I was avoiding during conversation and argument.
          • I am less than 23 years old guy and a muslim and a strong and strict monotheist. I told you somewhere that how hard you try and how logically you prove the non-existence of God, I won't believe it.

• • • • • • • S: It's impossible to logically prove the non-existence of any possibly existent thing. You are making totally unreasonable demands by asking for me to prove that God doesn't exist, without asking me to prove that every other fictional being ever invented doesn't exist, i.e. Zeus, Peter Pan, Superman, etc. All of those beings, including God, aren't considered fictional because there have been "proofs" made to show that they can't exist, but rather because there's such a profound lack of evidence for their existence that the most rational, reasonable, likely assumption is that they don't, until substantial evidence to the contrary surfaces!

• • • • • • Everything is explainable including all the omnipotent paradoxes but requires some deeper knowledge of revealed religions. Christianity and Judaism are no longer in their original forms. The same teaching continues in a final religion named Islam. We muslims can be thoroughly accused of not presenting the religion in its totality and not presenting a complete model in front of whole of the world. I accept this. Muslims have seen their golden era some 1400 years back. It was more than golden I must say because there were lots of charity donators, but there was no one to accept that charity. It is unbelievable. There are a countless blessings involved with this system of life that this religion has given humankind.

• • • • • • • S: All of this is based on your unjustified assumptions, of course. You can make your arguments as detailed as you want, but if your premises are lacking, it's all just a house of cards. And how wonderful the Islamic "golden age" was hardly has anything to do with how whether or not theism is true. Success and truth are completely and absolutely unrelated concepts.

• • • • • • This is not called a religion rather it should be called a complete way of life that guides you right from the point of how to walk to the point of leading a complete nation.

• • • • • • • S: Lots of other religions do the same, so why can't we call it a "religion"? If we can't call Islam a religion just because it involves political advice, then I guess we can't call Confucianism or Judaism or countless other religions "religions".

• • • • • • Non muslims accept this that the Muhammad brought about the greatest revolution in the system of life in the history of mankind in a very very short period of time.

• • • • • • • S: This is based on the faulty assumption that because a man does something and then something else occurs and so on down the line, he is responsible for every result of his action that ever occurs. Crediting a single man for every achievement a Muslim ever accomplished is totally absurd; it would be akin to crediting Einstein for every scientific advance of the last fifty years. Just because a man's ideas led to some good things doesn't mean that the man is directly responsible for all those good things. Furthermore, just because's ideas led to some good things doesn't mean that they didn't also lead to some bad things; both Einstein and Muhammad indirectly caused much death and destruction through some of their actions, in Einstein's cause chiefly the research leading up to the Atomic Bomb, and in Muhammad's case the "crusade mentality", bigotry towards various perfectly harmless groups, and similar flawed teachings (though fortunately many modern Muslims do not subscribe to the same twisted thoughts that were once relatively common, just as a growing number of Christians are evolving out of a medieval mindset, leaving the fundamentalists in the dust in both cases).
            • S: When one analyzes the scriptures critically and from a relatively neutral perspective, the Qur'an actually teaches some harmful and immoral things, like the doctrine of hell. So does the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. All these arguments about religion being a requirement for morality would be a lot more convincing if there weren't so damned many religious people and religious books that are remarkably immoral, by modern standards.

• • • • • • I can clearly justify all these things in much greater detail if you are really interested. I hope you are because you promised you will give some time. I will try to stay as calm and neutral as possible and you promise me not to utter disgracing comments.

• • • • • • • S: I'll give you all the time you wish to use. There's no time limit here; post at will.

• • • • • • I must thank very much you once again for the time you have spent but I need a little more time. You said that I must justify myself instead of recommending a reading material for you. I agree but I need some cooperation form your side.
          • The holy scripture called Qur'an is miracle in itself and I will explain in detail how but first let me know will you accept the truth if it really reveals yourself in front of you?

• • • • • • • S: I will accept it's truth if it conforms with all of my observations and analysis of reality over the course of my life. If it ends up telling me interesting and revealing things about myself, then it's a wonderful book, but that certainly doesn't make it more likely that it's other teachings that aren't specifically related to my gaining a deeper understanding of myself are any more accurate. Just because two teachings come from the same source doesn't mean that both are of equal value. Everyone is wrong on some things and right on others, and holy books are not exception to that rule.

• • • • • • I hope this reply will at least let you know how concerned I am. At least I wrote much extensively instead of just typing a sentence. I hope that works. Waiting for you response. PassionInfinity 07:16, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

• • • • • • • • S: Thank you for taking the time to reply in-depth and explain your beliefs and background. That is extremely helpful, and I promise not to let it prejudice me against anything you will say, and I also apologize for snapping at you with some of my last comments. I was getting a bit frustrated with the way the debate was going and with what I saw as an insubstantiality to many of the recent exchanges, but you've helped remedy that by giving some real background on your belief structure. If you have any questions about my own beliefs, I'll gladly explain anything you're curious or confused about, or just interested in. So, thanks again for detailed reply, and I hope to continue this conversation. I think I'll move it to its own subpage soon, User:Silence/PassionInfinity because it's getting so long and taking over my Talk page. (I'll archive it with the rest of my talk page eventually, of course, but while it's still active this is probably easiest.) -Silence 20:47, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

You will try finding some scientific or logical explanation for that. But does that scientific or logical explanation deny the existence of God?

• S: It denies the existence of both God and Santa Claus based on lack of evidence. Explain to me what the big difference is between God and Santa Claus and maybe I'll take theism slightly more seriously. If anything, Santa Claus is a hell of a lot more scientifically valid than God, because at least Santa Claus is less of an undefined, "X" concept, its definition changing wildly from conversation to conversation and person to person and sentence to sentence. The word "God" is such a useless, confusing, ambiguous, rhetorical billion-meaninged word that even if we ever did find any being that's remotely like any of the common conceptions of "God" in existence today, scientists would never call such a being "God", but would ascribe it some other, more specific and relevant name with less chance of causing confusion. The fact that so few theists choose to do the same is pretty disheartening and telling, showing that they prefer the rhetorically useful word to a more specific and meaningful one.

• • PI: I don't believe in Santa Claus and I don't even know what exactly this concept is and nor am I interested in knowing. So am not interested in differentiating between them.

• • • S: If you don't differentiate between Santa Claus and God, then why do you believe in one and not the other?

• • • • PI: I suppose Santa Claus is specific to christians. Butstill I don't know this concept even.

• • • • • S: No, plenty of non-Christians believed in Santa Claus as children. It's more Western-centric than Christian-centric, these days, I suppose. If you don't understand the reference, read Santa Claus or just give me any other obviously untrue fictional character to use as an example, like the Boogeyman or the Tooth Fairy.

Who made these scientific laws of nature?

• S: Who said they had to be made? This is one of the great, immortal fallacies of human thought: the assumption that because something exists, it must be have been created by somebody; that because something is orderly and , it must have been planned by somebody. People like you are tragically blind to the very real and likely possibility that not everything (aside from you ill-defined "God") is necessarily, by default, void, or chaos. What makes you think that the universe isn't naturally in a state of order and a set system of rules? What makes you think that the laws of nature aren't inherent to existence itself, and vice versa? What makes you think that the laws of nature don't necessitate themselves? Someone like you, who bases an argument entirely on ground as weak and fragile as "you don't agree with me because you're not open-minded enough", must be especially certain to keep an open mind to all possibilities, especially likely ones. Not just ones that you find comforting and familiar. So: try to do that now.

• • PI: I think I have discussed it above.

• • • S: I'm pretty sure you haven't.

• • • • PI: Simply very hard to believe it. Seems ver non-sensical.

• • • • • S: What does? Few things make more sense than the principle that the laws of nature did not need to be written. The laws are not laws in the human sense, they are not creations intended to guide human activity. They are just descriptions of the way things are. Things are naturally orderly, consistent, and active—that's just how it goes. The assumption that things are naturally nonexistent, or naturally chaotic and random, in lieu of a God, is not only profoundly egotistical and anthrocentric, but also just plain wrong.

Try using scientific explanation for that and go on in infinite recursion! All these atheistic concepts revolves around scientific concepts and explanations.

• S: Not all atheists base their belief on the scientific method. ... Just the smart ones. Still, I fail to see your point: what's wrong with science and logic? They're phenomenally useful tools that have enormously improved the quality of life of humankind over the last few hundred years. Where's the problem?

• • PI: I never said that the tools are wrong. You will have to explain all these in terms of at least one of these
  • The One (Socrates)
  • The Unmoved Mover (Plato)
  • The Ultimate Cause
  • The Ultimate Truth
  • May be many others. I don't know all.

• • • S: None of those four things you listed are God. dictionary.com defines God as:

  1. God
        1. A being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions.
        2. The force, effect, or a manifestation or aspect of this being.
  2. A being of supernatural powers or attributes, believed in and worshiped by a people, especially a male deity thought to control some part of nature or reality.
  3. An image of a supernatural being; an idol.
  4. One that is worshiped, idealized, or followed: Money was their god.
  5. A very handsome man.
  6. A powerful ruler or despot.

• • • S: Incidentally, the One is a meaningless, self-fulfilling term, the Unmoved Mover/Ultimate Cause is the Big Bang if anything, and the Ultimate Truth is just reality itself. None of those necessitate a God-being, and thus Occam's Razor cuts them all to bits. Next?

• • • • PI: I did not demand that.

• • • • • S: Did not demand what? The truth? :)

Evolutionary prinicples brought a thorough disaster this way. I hope I am not missing something, may be just got off my mind!

• S: Sorry, these two sentences don't make any sense. What disaster have "evolutionary principles" brought? And what is the last sentence in reference to...?

• • PI: Since you break my paras apart therefore, it doesn't make any sense. Evolutionary disasters are all related to Darwinism which lead to atheism (or at least played a very important role in that).

• • • S: Darwinism does not lead to atheism, Darwinism leads to a correct understanding of how life changes and adapts to new environments. Science and reason in general can be said to lead to atheism, because their standards tend to be too high for such silly and ill-formed beliefs to stand up to, though many scientists and logicians are theists anyway (they're a minority, though).

• • • • PI: Darwinism is proved wrong. I am not discussing how but its very hupothesis is flawed. Statistically proved.

• • • • • S: How do you define "Darwinism", and what proof and flaw are you referring to? If you're not "discussing how", then why have you already referenced Darwinism more than a dozen times in this conversation of ours?

Really... what exactly does that mean? Should I blindly trust Logic?

S: You should not blindly trust anything. You seem to be equating logic with an authority, which makes little sense; logic is just a system of thought, a tool we use to try to cut through the nonsense and improve the lives of mankind by more quickly and easily determining right propositions from wrong ones, an invaluable aid when it comes to things like the fields of medicine, engineering, politics.. Logic has saved lives, and continues to. This gets a bit closer to the real reason logic is so popular these days: it's not because logic supports its own existence, as that would be cyclic (though it is noteworthy that logic is consistent with itself); rather, it's because logic is useful. Logic has proven an effective system of thought and analysis, and if any flaw in logic ever did present itself, we would immediately change some aspect of the field of logic so as to correct this error. To criticize logic is about as silly as criticizing mathematics; we don't "blindly trust" math equations, we just make use of them because they're useful, consistent, and benefit mankind!

I never said that you should blindly trust logic and also I never said that logic is totally nonsense. What happens to logic when I ask such a question like "What is beyond this universe?" and "Concept of a universe that has no serial time.". There is no limit to imagination, then think about it. See how you come up!

S: I value both logic and the imagination. But most humans have a pretty silly understanding of existence. They have this irrational need for there to be something beyond everything, some mysterious other; whether there is such a thing or not, people would still believe that there was, so it's dangerously easy to just assume such things. For example, if God existed and we were sure of his existence, I bet a ton of people would start believing in a SuperGod that is even more beyond, more awesome, more infinite than the last one. The human mind has as much trouble grasping finity as it does infinity, if not more.

PI: How can you claim it? How do you call that understanding as silly? You don't know the state of mind of the other person when he is uttering such a word.

S: It's silly because it's a totally baseless assumption. What their thought processes are leading up to the assumption is largely irrelevant.

PI: How are they irrelevant?

• S: For the same reason that I don't need to know the thought processes leading up to every single individual racist's form of racism to say that racism is a silly notion. You claim that I can't criticize anything unless I "know the state of mind of the other person when he is uttering such a word". Meaning that you require that I be a telepath in order to have an opinion on anything. Sorry, but you demand too much.

• • PI: And that was your final argument? You can't even move out of your five senses or at least not willing to and still claiming a lot as you have done at the top.

• • • S: You can't move out of your five senses either. The only difference is that you delude yourself into believing you can. Does that make your understanding of the world better? No, it makes it worse, because your wishful thinking has confused you into believing that something is true just because you wish it was true or believe that it's true. That's why you're comfortable believing things you have no reason to believe in, and I'm not—I don't believe in things unless I can justify them. If you want to know why, I can tell you in one word: "Holocaust". Or how about "Racism". Or "Crusades". Hundreds of thousands of people can believe to the core of their beings that a certain thing is true, and that does not make it even an iota more true. That is the danger of failing to justify or critically analyze your beliefs, and it is a truly horrific and ever-looming danger.

Something that can't yet be answered in terms of scientific or logical explanation is irrelevant.

• S: I never said that the belief itself was irrelevant. I said that the belief is silly (because it's not based in reality, just on what people wish reality was like), and that the thought process "leading up to the assumption is largely irrelevant", i.e. their state of mind when they say something doesn't change the fact that what they say is completely without any basis other than wishful thinking. But your argument continues to skirt around the actual issues I addressed and just try to nibble at the edges of it by nitpicking my word choice and accusing me of being closed-minded just for voicing my opinion on a common belief that I find to be rather silly. Tell me when you're ready to actually discuss what I said, rather than trying to corner me into a rhetorical corner with that tired old "all opinions are right" argument.

• • PI: Discuss what? I am afraid I forgot this thread sequence. Sorry for that!

• • • S: Then go back up and read what led up to this? The entire conversation is still readily available on this page... (And now I've re-integrated the sections to try and make it easier for you to keep track of the conversation's direction.)

Don't talk about state of minds as lobes of brain going through some complicated reactions with a heavy inter-nerone traffic through dendrites.

• S: More bizarre lines that don't seem to make any sense. Why can't I talk about states of mind in that way, and what makes you think I did?

• • PI: Bizarre because you didn't get them. It was a sort of tool oriented taunt!

• • • S: Bizarre because they're poorly-worded, demonstrating a lack of knowledge of English grammar and word choice. Which I wouldn't mind at all if you then made some attempt to clarify what you meant, but you consistently fail to even try to, just further insulting or accusing me of things because I'm not a mind-reader who can pierce through such opaque and nonsensical statements. But fine. If you don't want me to understand something you've said, you clearly don't want a response to it, either; so I won't.

• • • • PI: By the way there is no word difficult for a bio student. Easily understandable sentence. To which field are you in?

• • • • • S: I'm not sure what your sentences mean here. I didn't say that any of the words in your line were difficult. Rather, the sentence construction and context made absolutely no sense, and seemed totally irrelevant to the conversation surrounding it.
        • S: If you're asking what field of science I'm involved in, there are several I study casually, though I'm certainly not a scientist. Why do you ask, and how is that significant? I don't have to be a scientist to discuss science any more than I have to be a politician to discuss politics.

This brain is a result of evolution as Darwin proposed. I know!

• S: Yet another completely random reference to Darwin and evolution, and yet you still refuse to state your direct views on the issue. Joy.

• • PI: See below. It was not a random reference. Don't break the paras apart next time.

• • • S: Why not? I originally read the entire paragraph in one, and it made even less sense. I only broke it apart so I could explain that it made no sense even in context. Reread what you wrote yourself and you'll see how insane and random your train of thought seems to be.

But to answer your question, logic has been used to seek answers for those questions, and they've gotten a lot closer than any attempts to figure such questions out that haven't used logic. I'm not in any way saying that you can't make up and imagine extremely unlikely possibilities for your entertainment, but you shouldn't then expect them to be taken seriously—because almost everything is possible, a statement needs to have more going for it than just "it could be!" to merit serious analysis.

PI: This didn't answer my question. Can you imagine a universe that has no concept of serial time and distance? I am asking Can you?

S: Maybe I can, maybe I can't; how can you be sure that a certain concept is unimaginable just because no one seems to have yet imagined it? If you're still just trying to prove that the human intellect is limited, you're wasting your time, because we both already know that.

PI: Very fine! So we agreed upon this too!

You cannot teach Einstein's theory of Relatively to a dog. Can you?

S: And you can't teach the Bible to a hermit crab. What is your point? We are not dogs.

You never get my point! Assume you have never seen and heard of an apple in whole of your life. If someone uses this word in front of you at the age of 40, will you be able to comprehend it without seeing it? I must say there is a lot more to this universe than you can ever think of!

S: What's the point of using the word "apple" around someone without explaining to him what the word means? Even if he hasn't seen an apple, if you at least try to give an idea of what applies like by describing its size, shape, color, how it compares to other fruits, etc., they can get some idea. But if you just use the word without telling them what it means or giving them a chance to pick it up from context, then "apple" is just a sound. Language, like logic, is a tool to further understanding and improve communication between people. Logic never says that it's perfect, or that it can solve every problem or teach you all the secrets of the universe; that's because it doesn't need to, it only needs to do better at helping us understand the universe than every other way of thought (like introspection without any observation of the outside world to accompany it, authoritarianism and dogmatism, completely random chance..) to merit frequent use. That our ability to understand is limited does not imply that we should stop trying. One of the most important lessons one can learn in life is: Something can have value without being perfect.

PI: Look, if I start uttering such words that you have not heard of before ever in your life, will you be able to get them? I can bet on it that answer must be NO and it should be. I hope you got my point where we are heading to?

S: I don't get your point, no. Though you did just say the same thing I said when I explained that "apple" is just a sound to someone who hasn't learned its English linguistic meaning.

PI: Leave that sound thing aside. All these newer concepts are a result of this complications. Man started using tools (so-called tools) to make their life better. Unfortunately, experimentally shown, he made his life even more complicated and full of tension. Just a bit naturally different kind of tension.

• S: So? Everything good in life makes life more complicated. Medicine makes life more complicated by letting people live longer lives. And I'm sure that people felt plenty of stress before they had tools, too, what with having to worry day and night about being abruptly devoured by a predator or somesuch. Tools gave people the ability to choose, to some extent, on an individual level, what they want out of life, and to pursue happiness to a much greater extent. Arguing against tools is like arguing against life, or light, or existence. Sure, things would be simpler without anything—but who said that simplicity is always a good thing?

• • PI: I am not spending time expanding this. You always take it as your belief. Cheers!

• • • S: Oy. Yet another criticism for not blindly accepting everything you say as gospel, and yet another refusal to at all justify or explain anything you've said. Delightful.

No matter how logical you are. It is impossible.

S: Is this supposed to be some sort of criticism of logic? "Because you can't teach logic to dogs, logic is bad." What kind of nonsense is that? You could say the same thing about language, art, science, religion, culture, civilization, or love; why should we have to be able to teach something to a dog for it to be valuable to us? That's just nonsense.

Ohhhh... I think you should get my point by now.

S: I get it now, but almost noone would have gotten it just from the two rather random sentences you originally had. Your metaphor has dozens of possible explanations, and there was no indication that it meant "like humans, dogs have limited intelligence and there are things that are simply beyond us", especially without any context to help clarify that. But, yes, now it's clearer.

PI: Fine! no futher arguments.

What is so difficult in understanding that there may be somethings even more complicated that our minds just can't grasp?

S: Nothing. What is so difficult in understanding that there may not be some things even more complicated than our minds can ever grasp? Either is possible, so to assume that there is definitely information beyond our ken is silly and pointless until we have some evidence to suggest that. What's most important is to keep our minds open and to analyze each new likely possibility critically and thoroughly so as to determine to the best of our abilities whether it's probably true or not. If you're rejecting logic, then you're failing to keep your mind open, and likely succumbing to dogmatism (which would be unfortunate), though you haven't specified what alternatives you'd propose to logic thus far, making your arguments largely rhetorical exercises, if not outright preaching. That's the unfortunate thing about arguing with someone who refuses to even attempt to be logical; nothing can ever go anywhere unless one party blindly accepts the other's proposition for no reason. Not gonna happen.

I am not rejecting logic. It should be clear by now. I know what you are talking about. "An unexamined life is not worth living". We are rational beings and we should stay rational and must never forget our identity to be called as human beings. By the way, logic, art and literature won't let you do this. They won't let you appreciate the intricate laws of nature.

S: I disagree. Logic, art, and literature will let you appreciate the intricate laws of nature. They just won't do it all; they're tools, paths, pieces of a larger puzzle, not the be-all and-all in themselves.

PI: Dicussion on tools follows! You are referring to mathematics, language and logic and other things as tools to improve life. Right? OK! So do you think these tools are more than enough to help us in every way possible?

S: Of course not. I said they were useful, not perfect. Perfection is impossible, and I wouldn't want it even if it was possible.

PI: So you reluctant to accept any 'truth' that leads to something like perfect?

• S: If it's "something like perfect" then it's not perfect, now is it? Your statement has absolutely no basis in what it is responding to. I said that perfection is impossible, not that improving as much as we can is a bad thing. But then again, I can hardly even tell what you're saying half the time, so maybe you aren't even arguing what I think you are. Could you please clarify?

• • PI: No it is perfect.

• • • S: [insert sound of baseball bat hitting skull]

• • • • PI: Fine then!

• • • • • S: You can be a frustratingly opaque human being sometimes. There's almost always a world of difference between talking to someone in that person's native language and talking to them in a learned language, sadly.

May be there are many other tools that we have not yet discovered till now. Possible?

S: Of course.

So you should now understand the philosophy behind this. These tools have limitations and that you have to agree. Language has limitations. You cannot certainly transfer everything that you think in language.

S: Obviously.

The so called languages are nothing other than just symbols.

S: Right. I love symbols. They help make life worth living.

Don't complicate things by introducing sounds now as you did before. That will be discussed later. I don't remember who proposed this, it was something like There is no knowledge. If there is it cannot be attained and even if it can be attained then we don't have language to do that!

S: That's only true if you define "knowledge" as "information that is definitely true". If you just define it as "information" or "reasonably reliable information", as I do, then of course we have knowledge.

PI: You mean to say that there is no information in this world that is definitely true. Right?

• S: Right. (More or less.)

• • PI: Fine! Again a belief related thing. I am not discussing this.

• • • S: ... How is it a belief-related thing? It's a fundamental aspect of the relationship between us and existence. Certainty simply does not exist, except in things which we define as needing to be a certain way, such as mathematics. Reality itself is by nature not 100% certain, ever.

• • • • PI: Well, I believe that there is such information. No get it how it is belief related?

• • • • • S: It's not belief-related just because you disagree with me. That's like saying "I disagree that 2+2=4, therefore the statement '2+2=4' is merely a belief and I won't discuss it." Until you can provide any sort of reliable evidence or information contradicting 2+2=4 (or, in this case, contradicting the obvious and fundamental fact that total certainty about anything is impossible, because everything we experience has the remote potential to be a fabrication or delusion), you're just using more evasive rhetorical tactics to try to avoid discussing something, trying to paint the situation like the problem is with the subject matter, which is inherently subjective, when in truth the problem isn't with the subject, it's with you because of your unsupportable claims. 2+2=4 isn't "belief-related", it's just something you refuse to argue against in detail because you know you have nothing to support your personal assumptions with (which makes sense, because they're also incorrect)! If I'm wrong, prove me wrong by providing some evidence to support your belief.

Actually I don't remeber the exact wordings but that doesn't matter. Whether the above statement is true or false is not under discussion. What I want to convey is that these tools certainly have some limitations. Even now you should get an idea where we are heading to?

S: I agree entierly with you that they have limitations, and have absolutely no idea where you're headed. What's your point? Everything is limited, one way or another.

PI: So all tools have limitaions and that's what we have agreed upon! That means there is nothing that we can use to explore infinity. Afterall, the tools are limited even when added up together! Right?

• S: You still have yet to show that infinity exists, much less that it can be "explored". What makes you think that the universe isn't finite? It's certainly unfathomably huge and complex, but there are countless things that humans can't fathom and that are nonetheless quite finite.

• • PI: What does this has to do with the concept of infinity? Everything is finite. I know.

• • • S: Then why do you keep bringing up infinity? If you concede that it doesn't exist, yet repeatedly use it to try to make your points, your arguments become nonsense.

• • • • PI: This debate is getting more of an insult by your side I must say!

• • • • • S: Why? I called your argument nonsense because you refuse to define any of your contested terminology, you constantly contradict yourself, you repeatedly use ambiguous statements, and you regularly completely avoid the topic of conversation at hand in favor of going off on tangents without discussing anything I actually said. That has absolutely nothing to do with you as a person, just with the arguments you've provided me with on this page so far. And it's certainly something you could immediately correct, if you have the inclination, time, and ability to actually go back and reply to the many subjects you've inadequately skipped over or written off for no reason.
        • S: You, on the other hand, have already accused me (and millions of your other fellow human beings) of being "lower than animals", unethical, evil, and not even real human beings(!), and repeatedly (and more importantly, baselessly) accused me of being closed-minded and completely ignorant on the matters being discussed. All because of your own bigoted and narrow-minded attitudes, assuming that everyone has to share your exact, specific beliefs (even though you cannot rationally justify them whatsoever!) just to be decent human beings. I'd be equally offended if you said that all Muslims are sub-human, unethical, animalistic, ignorant, repressed people (as you've accused nontheists of being), so if I seem to be reacting harshly to you, I'm really just being consistent with how I handle bigoted value systems.

This universe is even more complicated than any of us have ever imagined!

S: Quite possibly. Does that mean we shoulds top trying to understand it altogether? The goal of science and logic isn't to get a perfect understanding of the universe, it's to get a better one; so far, it's succeeded quite admirably.

No way! Don't stop doing this. That's what we are supposed to do.

S: Agreed. So we both agree that logic isn't perfect or complete as a way of understanding the universe, and that it's nonetheless a great thing we should keep using. Uh... do we disagree on anything?

PI: I hope I have discussed it above. I hope this issue is resolved!

I will talk about Darwinism and other things later. Those arguments come afterwards. Thanks!

S: I can hardly wait. OK. Let's do this. -Silence 15:10, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Don't you worry, that is the most interesting topic against atheism and theism both!

S: Uh, OK?

PI: It is not too far. Be ready...lollzz

PI: Hey, I will write about Darwinism when I will be home too probably on weekend.

One more thing! Do you really think that you are not answerable to whatever you do in this world?

S: Depends on what you mean by "answerable". Actions have repercussions, but I don't believe in karma or divine judgment, no. I don't require a cosmic reward/punishment system to want to live a good life; my love of my fellow man is the only motivation I require to do good works.

PI: So whatever you do you are not responsible to anyone?

S: What does "responsible" even mean in that context? There is no universal, objective force that judges us. We can be responsible to other people, but we are this because it's the most productive and happy and sensible way for us to live, not because there's anything approaching a significant possibility of ultimate reward or punishment for us.

You should not be answerable to anyone about your wife and your children, then why care for them.

S: Because caring for them makes you happy and makes them happy, and thus makes the world a better place.

S: Because you love them? Why, do you not love your family? Would you not care for them if you weren't scared of being punished if you didn't? That's kind of sick and scary, actually, no offense.

PI: Why this love for them? Origin for this? Is it inbuilt in your personality? I hope you got it?

S: The origin of love is in physical reactions provoked by certain emotional stimuli. There is love because love encourages society and gathering together for mutual protection, encourages mating so the race can live on, and encourages staying together to raise the child so he has the best chance at happiness possible. Does that answer your question?

PI: Oh... the story inevitably leading us to evolution as I have got it.

• S: That's your trademark response to everything. Why do you refuse to ever actually address any of these issues, always tossing them aside for later because you think that they somehow, distantly relate to evolution, which apparently has some profound significance for you in some as-yet-unexplained way? What a cheap tactic. -Silence 18:38, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

What accounts for moral values?

S: If you're asking where morals come from, moral values are an evolutionary mechanism designed to further the survival of the species. At a fundamental level, they are designed just to help us all survive and further our species; the only difference between a fish's "moral" values of "right and wrong" (like "don't bash your head into a rock") and a human's "moral" values is that humans have vastly more complex and abstract systems of what is good and bad for survival. With greater intellect and more elaborate civilizations, there's much more room for diversity and disagreement between people on what's best. It certainly makes things interesting.

PI: So the whole story revolves around evolution. Right? That would be the most interesting argument ever! Just go on!

S: Hm? Do you want me to elaborate on something I said?

PI: No, nothing.

Why to speak the truth always?

S: Good question. What good does it do to always speak the truth? You should speak the truth when it improves the lives of yourself and those around you, and not speak the truth when speaking the truth would harm them. Truth is not a virtue or a goal in itself; it's only a good thing in general because being honest is often the best way to find happiness, satisfaction, love, kindness, etc.

PI: Disagreed! Who decides this virtue? You?

S: What do you mean? I said truth wasn't a virtue. Individual people can attribute varying amounts of value to it, but regardless, there are many things more important than raw truth. For example, compassion, open-mindedness, diversity, happiness...

Who told you truth is always the way to be chosen?

S: I don't understand what this sentence means. I didn't say to always choose truth, I said the opposite.

PI: Thats the point. You don't even think morals are inbuilt. Whenever possible, we should tell a lie and that is all fine. How will this lead to healthy social system? If truth is better but not best, then there is nothing like morals.

• S: How could the opposite lead to a healthy social system? How is telling people that telling the truth is more important than improving the happiness of humankind conducive to a "healthy social system"? You seem to be making huge assumptions about what should or shouldn't be "moral" without justifying why such things need to be moral, and then indirectly accusing me of condoning immortality just because I don't blindly accept your unstated and unexplained assumptions. If you disagree with me that truth is only good when it helps people, then explain to me why you feel that way. I've already explained my own view quite thoroughly.

• • PI: I have explained it earlier.

• • • S: Not in a conversation with me, you haven't. You've just made blatant, huge assumptions and expected me to go along with them for no reason. That's not the definition of the verb "explain".

If truth is better but not best, then there is nothing like morals.

• S: If that's how you define "morals", then it's a good thing that there are none.

Suppose you never got any training from your parents and no worthy interaction with other people, would you still believe that truth and honesty is a better choice?

S: When did I say that it was a better choice? Better than what? Truth is good when it helps people, and bad when it hurts people. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good in truth whatsoever; it is only goor or bad depending on what results it gives and what motivations are the cause of it.

PI: No, there is something that is intrinsically good in truth and honesty (including to make my point clearer).

• S: Incorrect. When telling the truth hurts people unnecessarily, truth is evil. When telling the truth helps people, truth is good. There is nothing intrinsically in anything; something must be good for someone, not just good by nature. Goodness is always relative to a specific subject (the subject I use is almost always "humankind", but saying that goodness is "intrinsic" implies that something could be good even without anyone for it to be good for!), by the very definition of the word "good", just like "heavy" has to be relative to an object (there is no inherent "heaviness", because something can only be heavier or less heavy or just as heavy relative to something else's heaviness) and just like something can't be inherently "difficult" without having someone for it to be difficult for. If you disagree, you'd better be ready to provide some pretty damned good evidence for the existence of intrinsic goodness, because that's one of the most massive and potentially dangerous assumptions conceivable, and should not be taken up without careful consideration, analysis, and explanation.

• • PI: So everything is relative to some other thing. Someone is wise compared to someone else. Wiseness is all relative. Right? Nothing called absolute? Relativity without absoluteness?

• • • S: Not everything is relative, but subjective qualities like "good", "difficult", and "wise" certainly are. Again, your extremist tendencies jump to the conclusion that everything must be either one thing or another, like the world is black or white, with no shades of grey. Sorry to disappoint you.

• • • • PI: I am not disappointed.

• • • • • S: How disappointed you are is irrelevant to the conversation at hand. Stop evading and respond to the truths I have just stated, whether you agree with them or not. If you don't, then you either concede that you have no ground on which to stand in this area of the debate, or have no opinion whatsoever on the matter, neither of which it sounds like you want to have seen as being your position.

Secondly, is the satisfaction you are talking about really satisfaction?

S: Yes. It is really satisfaction. Something can be truly satisfying without being 100% satisfying. In the same way, you can have freedom without having complete freedom; perfection, completion, flawlessness, searching for things like these is always a waste of time.

PI: What if there is something that has 100% perfection.

• S: What if the color orange is named Fred and hates Gatorade. What is the point of all these aimless hypothetical questions?

• • PI: Useless to comment!

• • • S: Then you shouldn't have made your initial statement.

• • • • PI: I mean, I prefer staying quiet.

• • • • • S: That's not a good thing. You should prefer to speak your mind in full, reasonably and in an organized, sensible manner, keeping an open mind to alternative viewpoints. Instead, you just randomly spout out and allude to your own deeply-ingrained set of beliefs, refuse to ever clearly and rationally explain them so anyone else can fully debate anything with you, and repeatedly dodge and evade any points which you can't think of a quick, easy, meaningless retort to. Being quiet is not such a good thing.

Again you can explain it in terms of brain activity during satisfaction. I hope we are converging. That nice!!!

• S: If by "converging" you mean "terribly confused and not understanding a word of what you're saying right now," then yes, we're converging.

• • PI: Converging means we are converging to evolution. Since it explians everthing and will eventually explain the remaining things, therfore god doesn't exist.

• • • S: Evolution does not explain everything. Evolution is a process through which the genetic composition of a population changes during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species. Evolution applies solely to how life changes, not to anything else.

• • • • PI: It helps explain everything. It says life began by chance. Proteins molecules formed by chance. Do you know the probability that a 400-amino-acid protein molecule having life is formed by chance?

• • • • • S: Do you know how many trillions of planets life had the possibility of forming by chance on? Also, recent scientific research has actually indicated that the possibility of the correct combination of amino acids forming is much higher than previously estimated, though research is still underway. But all of that is irrelevant; even if the odds of life occurring were infinitessimably small, as long as you refuse to provide any other remotely likely possibilities for how life might have formed, as long as Occam's Razor continues to slice apart your totally redundant and meaningless God, you're explaining nothing.
        • S: If you really want to understand the origin of life, quit wasting your time on theology and start studying abiogenesis.

To hell with moral values and this world, I don't care.

S: That's unfortunate. Apathy is one of the things I least like. Largely because it's pretty boring. It's so much more fun, interesting, and delightful to care, even when the things you care about are petty and absurd. Apathy is two steps removed from death, the end of possibilities and exploration. Why squander any more of your life than absolutely necessary? Enjoy it while you've got it.

PI: Its not about motivation or absence of it! Pointless to comment on it.

I have to die whatever the case and that is the biggest and the truest reality!

S: So what? What's your point? "the biggest and truest reality" is a very pretty little line of poetry, but it has little real meaning; people naturally tend to become fixated on death, but one of the signs of maturity is being able to (at least partially) accept the reality of death, without acting like death means that there's no reason to live.

S: So? Everyone dies. Nothing is permanent. That's the entire reason life and everything is so beautiful. If we had it forever, had it perfect, we could never possibly appreciate it.

PI: Oh... Wish for your death if you really think that way! You won't do it.

S: Why should I wish for my death? I said that it's good that death comes eventually, because it lets us cherish and appreciate life. I didn't say that it's good to rush death; just the opposite, I believe that as long as there is life, there is hope and possibility, and you should always do your best to keep living if only because it's so much more interesting and unpredictable than the alternative.

PI: That means you fear death!

• S: Incorrect. Reread what I said. I never said that I feared or dreaded death. I said that I don't like death and prefer life whenever that's a viable option. You might as well have said "That means you fear peanut butter!" in response to my saying that I don't like to eat peanut butter. Fear is not the only reason to want to avoid doing something, so please don't make baseless leaps like that.

That is exactly why you can't be a good fighter because life is everything.

• S: A good fighter? Are you recommending that I take up a career as a professional boxer, or is this getting confusing and nonsensical again?

• • PI: Very funny!

The appreciation of life ends with death. You have no more existence even to appreciate according to you. It was just a comment by the way!

• S: OK.

This leads to a conclusion that that this life is completely useless!

S: Who cares whether life is useful? And more importantly—Useful to whom? Useful to itself? Useful to God? Useful to Bill Gates? Useful to my pet dog? Useful to the universe? "Useful" requires something to be useful towards, there's no such thing as objective "usefulness"; when I use "useful", it's almost always in reference to what's useful for humankind, so how can humankind itself be useful to anything but itself? What is your univeral standard?

PI: I know there is nothing like objective usefulness. Let me say useful for yourself. Be honest to your life at least!

• S: Fair enough. But let's cut the BS—but what does "useful to yourself" actually mean. How can you not be "useful to yourself"? What about yourself is there to be useful to? Saying that doing a certain thing is "useful to yourself" is nonsensical in a vacuum, and requires a whole range of assumptions regarding what is in a certain person's best interest. By "useful to yourself" do you mean "useful towards getting what you want"? Or "useful towards survival"? Or "useful towards being you"? Or what? To explain, here's how I see our conversation on this matter so far:
• You: "Are you saying that X is useless?"
• Me: "If X is inherently 'useful', then who is it useful for?"
• You: "X is useful for X."
• See the problem yet?

• • PI: Just a complication, nothing else!

• • • S: ... No?

S: Well, of course it's useless. Only tools have a use, and what could life possibly be used as a tool for, other than to further and preserve itself? Something can be useless without being valueless. Specifically: art. The supremely useless thing, and therefore, in my opinion, the best of all things. And life, being so ultimately meaningless and complex and transient, is the biggest and most beautiful work of art there ever was and ever shall be. Bitterness is silly and immature, a way of hiding from reality and the facts. Rather than waiting for an authority figure/parent/god to use you and thus make you feel useful, why not give your own life meaning?

PI: That is the way you think! I don't think we are born without any purpose.

S: And that's the way you think. But I justified how I think with logic and detailed analysis; you didn't justify yours at all. I'm waiting.

PI: You are using tools to justify.

• S: That's what the tools are for. There's no other way to rationally justify anything. If you aren't going to even try to justify, explain, or reason out why you think or say the things that you do, then your only recourse left is to either shirk all contact with human beings and avoid ever stating your opinion on anything (clearly not what you're doing with this conversation), or to try to convince others with trickery, rhetoric, and confusion tactics, which is horribly dishonest and unconstructive. If you intend to do neither of the latter two things, then I recommend that you try to justify what you're saying somehow. I have no interest in worshiping you as an authority just because you have the ability to type; you also have to explain yourself.

• • PI: Didn't get you either. Lost the sequence may be. Repeat your question in one sentence.

• • • S: It's not a question, it's a statement: "Tools like logic are supposed to be used to justify statements."

I am avoiding this justification not because there is a limited space or we can't start two topics but because that will inevitably lead to biased arguments.

• S: Explaining why you believe what you believe leads to biased arguments? That's possibly the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life. Congratulations.

• • PI: :):) Ohh... by your side I meant. Congrats to you on your absurdness or at least an aburd and silly comment without knowing the matter!

• • • S: Since you know next to nothing about me, you have no justification to assume that anything you could say would bias me unfairly against you. You insult me for no reason once again.

• • • • PI: What do you think you are doing?

• • • • • S: Not the same thing, that's what, since you're implying that I'm doing the same (though even if I was, that wouldn't make your doing it any less bad; huzzah for the tu quoque fallacy). A summary, to help keep things in perspective:
        • I said "Life is not a tool, therefore life is not useful, and does not need to be."
        • You responded by saying "That's what you think! I disagree with you!"
        • I responded by saying "Yes, that's what I think. But I supported everything I said with reasons and justifications, which you have yet to do. What do you base your belief in human usefulness on?"
        • You responded with the utterly meaningless "You are using tools to justify."
        • I responded by pointing out "These tools are supposed to be used to justify. If you don't justify what you say, noone has any reason to believe it has any truth to it."
        • You responded by saying that you didn't understand what I meant, so I explained again, and you then said, "I'm not justifying what I said because if I do it will lead to biased arguments."
        • I replied by pointing out the absurdity in the statement that explaining a belief will cause bias, when really all it causes is clarification and a deeper and much more meaningful understanding of the topics currently being discussed
        • You replied with a snide, obnoxious, incredibly rude comment saying "congrats to you on your absurdness" and saying that my comment is "an absurd and silly coment" that I'd made "without knowing the matter".
        • I responded by pointing out that you cannot make any statements about how much I know about the matter until you have any reason to believe that I don't know enough about the matter, and can support your accusations with some sort of evidence.
        • You responded by accusing me of doing the same thing you just did to me, and again refused to cite any examples of my doing so.
        • So I wrote this comment to make it painfully obvious that you are totally in the wrong on this one, and now I've done that, so I'll move on to the next point.

I am currently sufficing on reasoning only. I will definitely do that but when I will be home.

• S: Justification is reasoning. Just saying what you think isn't "reasoning", it's rambling. Explain and provide support for it too, unless you're just writing for yourself, not for me to respond to.

I can extend this topic tooooo much but keep it pending. I would like to listen to your views about that as well. The real difference between man and animal. Currently, we will go off topic!

S: I don't really understand what you're saying here. I don't see why we can't talk in-depth about multiple subjects at once; the Internet and Wikipedia have limitless space.

PI: See above.

What is the purpose of our existence?

S: What is the purpose of anything? What is the purpose of the universe? There is no possible ultimate purpose for anything, because even if a god existed to control the universe, what would the purpose of god be? The flaw in all of this isn't in the way life and existence work, it's in the way we think; we have such a hard time getting out of the rut of wanting to be used, controlled, to be part of some great and ultimate and all-encompassingly enigmatic plan, that we can't accept the possibility that life could be just as good, maybe even better, without such a plan. Life is not a tool or a plan or a question, life is just.. life. Life as itself. Not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

The journey is the only important thing. The destination—death—is just a way to help us keep things in perspective.

PI: No way! The argument does not proceed this way. This is the way it is!

S: Excuse me? It just did proceed that way. :)

PI: :):) Do I really need to convince you even that its not the journey but the destination that is important.

• S: Of course you do, unless you have no interest in my believing that. After all, it's the journey that is important, not the destination. A book's point is not its final page, it is every page.

• • PI: Book and journey? What a comparison. Your time in flight is all in your flight to Mexico. Even more absurd. Congratulations!

• • • S: It's a fantastic comparison. Life is like a book in that both have value not for the very end of the book, or the very end of life (which is nothing but the final page, nothing especially special at all; same for death), but for the entire book, for the entire life. The whole thing is what is valuable, not just the end. The journey is what is important, not the destination.

• • • • PI: Ridiculous! What else?

• • • • • S: If you won't say why it's ridiculous, we'll have to assume you're BSing again. I also really don't appreciate it when I spend hours and hours responding in-depth to even your most flippant and irrelevant comments, and you respond by giving me one-sentence answers dismissing everything I say off-hand without any justification. This is not how people debate. You seem to be trying to transform a reasonable debate into a violent argument, by refusing to treat anything I say with the respect I've treated all of your statements—while I've analyzed and explored and tried to gain a better understanding of your opinion throughout this entire conversation, you've obviously spend less than a tenth as much time thinking about and responding to all of my points and providing any evidence for your views on the issues being discussed. That's really not very good debate etiquette. Just telling you for future reference.

• • • S: I'm also enjoying how increasingly ridiculous and nonsensical your statements are becoming. It's like watching the slow decay and collapse of a tower, as it tilts and warps further and further... The way you repeatedly say "congrats" and "congratulations" to me as though that somehow refutes anything I said, taken directly from above where I congratulated you for an especially nonsensical line of yours, is especially amusing. Like a trained parrot trying to win an argument.

PI: If we dont have a purpose then why are we here? Just to enjoy? Just? Just? to graze in this world? This should be the question.

S: It's a meaningless question if you can't explain what possible alternatives there would be. If we aren't here to just enjoy life, then what other possible reasons could we be here for? People love to complain about life being meaningless or useless or whatever, but I don't see how life could ever possibly be meaningful or useful, so such protestations strike me as being hollow and childish demands for the impossible.

PI: It is even more meaningless to assume that this life has no purpose.

• S: Blatant, and kind of sickening, evasion. You ask "If we don't have a purpose then why are we here? Just to enjoy?" I respond, "It's a meaningless question if you can't explain what possible alternatives there would be." And instead of replying by explaining what other possible reasons we would have to exist, you resort to cheap and obvious rhetorical tactics. Come on. Try harder than that. Not believing that life has a purpose is not an assumption; it is the lack of an assumption: the assumption that life does have a purpose, other than to exist.

• • I: See above!

• • • S: Half of your responses to me are "see above", and the other half are "see below". That is profoundly unfair. I spent hours replying in-depth to every single statement you made that I could at all comprehend, and specifically requested explanations for the lines which I wasn't able to decipher, and your response was to mock me for not being able to guess at the meaning of every single line you wrote, no matter how jumbled, and to ignore 95% of what I'd written in favor of a couple of lines of dismissive, baseless attacks. That's not a very good debate style, I'm afraid. The in-depth method is much more effective.

• • • • PI: That is what I do. But I don't tear apart one argument in 100 lines.

• • • • • S: You don't tear apart arguments at all. While I've been analyzing all of your statements in-depth and treating not only your whole arguments, but each of your individual statements, quite seriously and meticulously, you've been pointedly and consistently sloppy and offhand in your responses to my comments. While I've often replied to individual sentences of yours with entire paragraphs of carefully thought-out reasoning, you've almost universally replied to every single one of my paragraphs with less than a single sentence, only very rarely going into anything in any depth—and even when you have, it's chiefly been to rant about your own beliefs (all while failing to provide support for any of them), not to critically analyze mine.

• • • • It seems as if you are interrupting one while one is saying something.

• • • • • • S: Well I'm not, so get over that mistaken interpretation. I read the entire paragraph as one chunk before I split it up. I only split it up after I've read it so that you don't have to reread the paragraph and see which part I'm responding to when I write my response. If I didn't break up any of your paragraphs to reply, it would take you five times as long to read and understand them, because you'd have to keep going back up to see what new point of yours I'm responding to next. Splitting the paragraphs up is the most efficient and easy way to handle things, and I recommend that you do the same whenever you see something in mid-para you want to reply to, but also plan to reply to a separate point in later in the paragraph. I see you've already done that now with your latest responses, so you agree that the method is useful at least sometimes. If you think that I've been overdoing it, though, I apologize.

We are heading to our destination and that there is no such thing called destination, then why are we here?

• S: There is a destination, but the purpose of the journey is not the destination; the purpose of the journey is the journey.
• The flower does not bloom in order to shrivel up and blow away. It blooms in order to bloom.
• The star does not blaze in order to burn out. It blazes in order to blaze.
• Life does not live in order to die. It lives in order to live.
• Just because something is the final part of a journey does not mean that it is the reason for the entire journey, any more than the end of a dirt road necessarily being the reason that the entire dirt road exists. Maybe it's not that the dirt road exists because of the end of the dirt road, but rather that the end of the dirt road exists because of the dirt road...

That is how it is even more meaningless! Have you tried to ever discover that destination? Ever found even a tool that will help you discover?

• S: Yes. The tools of my senses, my mind and its reasoning abilities, and my experiences and growing understanding of the world, have given me quite a good understanding of the final destination of life (i.e. death). Why, are you bitter because yours haven't done the same?

How can a person that has just died can let you know where and under what conditions he is?

• S: Why should he have to? I don't need something impossible to happen (i.e. a dead person telling me what it's like to be dead, when by nature death is the cessation of all biological and neural functioning) just to have a pretty good understanding of death, any more than I need a flower to tell me what it's like to be a floor just to understand flowers. There are ways to learn about the world other than to have a first-person experiencer of a certain aspect of the world tell you about it. It's called "observation".

• • PI: Useless to comment because of your sick mindedness.

• • • S: Excuse me? Now you're calling me sick? How is it suck to understand that you can have some understanding of death, even without having experienced it yourself or had someone dead tell you about it? It's exactly like the majority of other things you can learn in this life: you can understand them quite well through observation and analysis, even if there's no absolute authority to instruct you in exactly how you should think about this or that. Things are better that way.

All the disputes would have ended by now, if this would have been possible.

• S: I doubt that. People will always believe untrue things. There are still people who dispute that the universe has existed for more than a few thousand years. If your definition of something being unknown and completely disputed is that not 100% of people agree on it, then you'll be sadly disappointed for the rest of your life in how few things meet your absurd standards of consensus.

• • PI: Means? Didn't get you.

• • • S: It means that your statement "All the disputes would have ended by now, if this would have been possible" was false. There will always be disputes, no matter how obvious something is.

So why assume this uselessness?

• S: You've got it backwards. Why assume the opposite?

• • PI: You claimed something new. You got it backwards.

• • • S: No, you've got it backwards. You're the one who made the positive claim in one of your initial arguments: that life is useful. I simply responded by refuting that claim, by demanding that you provide any evidence that life has any use, and to specify what life would be useful for if it did. I am still waiting for you to do so, so the burden of proof remains on you.

• • • • PI: You think destination is meaningless, how can an argument proceed that way?

• • • • • S: What do you mean? Why wouldn't an argument be able to proceed in this way? Mine just did, and it seems to have turned out perfectly fine. What problem do you actually have with it, beyond just the fact that you disagree with it? In other words, don't just repeatedly say that you disagree with me, say why you disagree with me! Say what the other alternatives are! Say what you base all of your assumptions on! Say it, and quit acting like everything you believe, no matter how strange and absurd, no matter how totally unjustified and unreasoned-out, is absolute common sense!

We are here now so useless to talk about if god ever existed....

S: Everything is useless. I thought we'd established that. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about things like god; it brings us pleasure, after all, to learn new things about ourselves and other people and the universe. And it lets us live more fulfilling lives, and lives that are more useful to ourselves and to our fellow man—not to some imaginary objective thing.

PI: Never never never! We never established that. I don't really know what made you think of that.

• S: That you didn't respond to my earlier points regarding the quality of usefulness. If you had a problem with any of my reasoning, you should have said something. Throwing a hissy fit won't solve anything.

But, what I am noticing is that we are converging to some extent!

• S: ... I still don't understand what you mean by "converging", but OK...

Purpose is not the only criterion to judge the universe the way you are doing!

S: When did I ever judge the universe? I thought you were the one saying that if life doesn't have an objective purpose, we should all die. That strikes me as the much more extremist statement than just suggesting something as simple as "maybe life doesn't need to be useful?"

PI: You have no argument behind it. Just a belief and that is it.

• S: Incorrect. I've already demonstrated my argument, only to have you ignore it. All while shoveling out even more evasion and rhetorical trickery to try to avoid everything I said while pretending to respond to it. Huzzah. -Silence 05:43, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

• • PI: Leave a message. PassionInfinity 08:20, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

• • • S: I was going to this morning, but you'd already responded. -Silence 18:38, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

• • • • PI: This debate is going biased and prejudiced.

• • • • • S: In your view. I'm not becoming any more biased and prejudiced than I was at the start of the argument, so are you accusing yourself of bias and prejudice, or what? Because I wouldn't agree that either one of us is becoming biased (any more than we were at the beginning, anyway). You just need to be clearer and more explicit with your assumptions and word-definitions, and to reply to my points in a lot more depth, so the conversation can go a lot more places. When only one side is contributing significantly, we get stuck in a rut.

• • • • PI: You are insulting more that me.

• • • • • S: I'd disagree with that. I never called all theists "lower than animals" or "not human" or accused you of being totally ignorant of the issues being discussed without any justification or explanation at all. I may have been a bit harsh with my criticism of your arguments, but at least I didn't denigrate an entire massive part of the human race as inherently inferior and lesser than you, and terrible, awful people in general, without fail.
        • S: I'm not the nicest person in the world, but at least I'm no bigot.

• • • • PI: You started this attack. I didn't.

• • • • • S: What "attack" are you referring to? If you mean the debate itself, you are the one who first came to Talk:Atheism looking to discuss these issues. You've been guiding the entire conversation's progress all along, by ignoring every point of mine you don't want to talk about and going off on bizarre tangents whenever there's something unrelated you want to discuss, and I've stood for it, but there are a few things I won't stand for.

• • • • What can be the solution. May be no force exists over atheists that can guide them and teach them ethics.

• • • • • S: No magical "force" exists over anyone to guide and teach people ethics. People teach themselves ethics. If we want people to be more ethical, we should reform and improve the education system, make empathy and compassion more prized and appreciated characteristics in our societies, and improve our understandings of other groups of people. Dropping down on our knees and praying to the sky will not in any way make us better people, will not make the world a better place. We have to do that for ourselves. It's a lonely idea, perhaps, but it's a true one, and once you get used to it, it's refreshingly free of illusion and self-lie.

• • • • May be because they are not answerable to anybody.

• • • • • S: Nobody is answerable to anyone—except for their fellow man. There is no cosmic, magical justice system out there, invisible to our eyes. Instead, there is something much more basic, much more real, much clearer: our own, human sense of ethics, our own rational and logical understanding of what we should do to best serve humanity's interests. Whether you believe in God or the Tooth Fairy or Spider-Man has nothing whatsoever to do with your capacity to do that. All that matters is that you are able to think and to feel.

• • • • "Who Cares"...

Leave a message. PassionInfinity 09:34, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

• • • • • S: You're quoting yourself, not me. In this conversation, it's the theist who appears to demonstrate bigotry, closed-mindedness, irrationality, dogmatism, apathy, authoritarianism, and a lack of a moral compass, whereas it's the nontheist who appears most strongly to have a genuine and self-sustaining love of the world and its people, without requiring any extraneous, external forces or Gods to create it within him. Humans love and live every day without being forced to do so by a great and all-powerful deity. They just do it anyway. Not for any use, not as a tool. Not for any secret meaning or hidden plan. They just do it.
        • S: And that's a nice thought, really. -Silence 03:43, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Nothing elite other than mere logic?

S: Logic is not elite. Logic is a tool we use to improve our lives. We use it to learn about each other and the universe, to focus our thoughts and learn about ourselves, to improve countless fields of learning and thus let more people have a better chance of enjoying life. I do not worship logic, any more than I would worship a hammer. But neither do I scoff at logic, or at hammers; they are instruments most fine.

PI: I think I have discussed that above. This was the right place!

Now something that may seem a bit rude, but is not. Take it calmly. What then is the difference between a man and an animal?

S: None. A man is an animal. Humans are a kind of animal. If you're asking what the difference is between men and other animals, however...

Men have much more complex thought processes and social organizations, have a vastly greater grasp of abstract concepts such as symbolism (priceless for language) and causality, and a long list of other differences, mainly stemming from our increased thinking and tool-making abilities. Does that satisfy your question?

PI: See below!

They have instincts to pass their lives the best way possible!

S: Of course they do. Is that a bad thing? But you're not listing ways they're different, you're listing ways they're similar; humans and other animals are similar in a large number of ways, but they're also different in a large number of ways. Things are never so black and white.

PI: Chemically, physically, biologically they are same. Agreed! Man has inherent tendency to complicate things. He has complicated many things in history. I don't need to prove this.

S: No, you don't. Though complication isn't always a bad thing, as long as we also keep things in perspective. Complexity is what allows us to have so much diversity.

Its not about good or bad about instincts. Its the nature that I am discussing. About the differences. This topic is an extension of the topic that I have kept pending above and wated to listen to your view about!

S: OK. But you'll have to clarify exactly what you want my views on. Are you saying that instincts are neither inherently good nor inherently bad? I agree, then. When I use "good" or "moral" or "ethical" or whatever, it usually just means to me "what's practical for humankind". Objective morality is impossible, just as objective usefulness is impossible.

PI: Fine! I am looking forward for your cooperation. I will try to as clear as possible.

We have intelligence to pass our lives the best way possible. I think you got it because you are intelligent enough (I mean openly declare the non-existence of God). PassionInfinity 06:11, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

S: Er, not quite sure what the last sentence means, but I think it's a compliment, so thanks! I'm enjoying this conversation more, now; I find it much more interesting to discuss the nature of existence than the value and limitations of logic. We can continue both lines of thought, though. -Silence 20:09, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

PI: If you think it is a compliment, then a compliment. At the end of the discussion, you will copy all this to my talk page so that I may have a record of it. We will discuss it here as the way you have proposed. Leave a short message there that you have replied! PassionInfinity 07:43, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

S: Sure, I'll gladly copy this elsewhere after we're finished; easier than to have to regularly switch pages while we're still in the middle (or just getting started).

PI: Leave a message! PassionInfinity 08:12, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Since the above's getting a bit long and elaborate, let's continue the conversation here. I'll finish responding to all the above in a few hours.

Since we're having some trouble keeping track of the conversation threads with everything split up, I'm re-integrating Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 will be distinguished by :s, Part 2 will use *s. -Silence 18:38, 10 October 2005 (UTC)