Feeling Stupid. . . . . .

[_SPG]

The amount of sugar Americans eat is 20x as we did 100 years ago. We might be eating 1000x that we were eating 1000 years ago.

There is an absolute limit as to how much of any substance a human body can consume before it reaches a toxic level. Too much water, sugar, alcohol, air, or Doritos will lead to death.

Agreed. And while we sometimes hyperventilate we don't try to peddle cure for it, (that I know of.) I mean, try not to stress and stay claim, but would we be spending $500 a month so we don't get too air?

[_Lemmie]

By adding additional bit of different perspectives I have changed the role of perspective???? No understandeee

You started by saying that if perspective A is right, then perspective not A is wrong. Those are opposites. When I pointed out that, using your logic, if you believe both A and Not-A are right you end up believing they are both wrong. Nonsensical.

Rather than respond you provided an example of an entirely different logical process. Irrelevant.

By the way, "fair enough" is not an adequate response to a CFR.

[_SPG]

By adding additional bit of different perspectives I have changed the role of perspective???? No understandeee

You started by saying that if perspective A is right, then perspective not A is wrong. Those are opposites. When I pointed out that, using your logic, if you believe both A and Not-A are right you end up believing they are both wrong. Nonsensical.

Rather than respond you provided an example of an entirely different logical process. Irrelevant.

By the way, "fair enough" is not an adequate response to a CFR.

In your first example, I was referring to the traditional or instinctual perspective of humans, that "If I'm right, others are wrong."

I don't think that anymore. You can be right, so can I.

[_Res Ipsa]

... All of these paragraphs of mangled science look like a brain that has serious doubts about the existence of God and also desperately wants to believe in the existence of God.

Res Ipsa, you say this as if I haven't basically admitted it.

Where did you basically admit that your brain has serious doubts about the existence of God? That doesn't square with your comments below.

In my search for God, I haven't found the Mormon God. I have met Archangels, Michael included, but none of them brought up Mormonism.

But, I have found so much more. There is no shortage of stuff to believe in. In fact, I feel like a kid in a candy show, diabetes not withstanding.

Yes, the human imagination is boundless. But most of what folks imagine could be true might as well be sugar.

I was angry at God. Then I cursed God and went about trying to understand the world without God.

I didn't get far. A world without God made no sense to me. The more I tried to explain life without higher beings the more stupid it seemed.

I was never angry with God. I never cursed God. I never tried to understand the world without God. I just tried to understand the world. And after decades of reading and studying to try and figure out how the world worked, I gradually realized that God was not necessary to make the world work.

I see so much more than what science tries to explain. Someone said that science admits they don't understand everything. But they don't even acknowledge stuff like the soul, memories of past lives, connection to higher beings through mediation, psychic visions of other beings.

You see? I think that every time you read of someone's anecdotal experience, you decide it must mean something other than something happening within their brain. Science studies evidence. And what science teaches us about memories of subjective experiences are about the least reliable evidence that exists.

I have tried to share my ideas and experiences with what I might consider parallel ideas or sciences. I am trying to discuss my ideas and perspective with a common language. I am not trying to convert anyone. But I have found a few people that seem to understand. I don't try to brain was them, they just seen to see what I see, in part.

It certainly appears to me that you've been trying to persuade people that your version of God is real and that people who leave the Mormon church shouldn't abandon God. I think that's different from simply discussing ideas. But that's not really even what I object to: what I object to is communicating false information and ideas as if it were fact. I could literally spend days on nonsense you've posted here tracking down and discussing the actual evidence that you continually exaggerate and misrepresent. The mermaid cave paintings is a great example. Tons of people like you have posted cave paintings of mermaids on their Pinterest accounts as evidence of mermaids, when what they are actually posting are CGI images created for the fake documentary. But you asserted it as fact. Based on what you've posted here, you simply latch onto anything that smacks of mystery and supernatural without any skepticism at all. But information backed by science and evidence, you flat out reject.

That you guys think you have nailed me down and boxed me in, you haven't even come close. I admit I don't know much, but I believe a lot of things strongly enough I would be my life on.

I don't think I've nailed you down and boxed you in. It does look like you think it's important not to be nailed down on anything. You make strong claims, then you back away and say you know nothing. But I don't think you really believe that, because it doesn't show in how you post. I think it's a nice dodge when someone shows that one of your claims is nonsense.

Do I have doubts? Tons and tons. Do I want God to exist? Absolutely!

But one doubt I don't have: Is there a God? I could not find evidence that there wasn't a God. I could describe God several ways. But you cannot show someone God, they have to find him.

And that's the fundamental problem: You keep claiming that neither your nor anyone else can really know anything. Except you know there is a God. And you make up an excuse for God: that you can't show God to anyone. One thing that's neat about contradictory premises: you can logically prove anything.

[_Lemmie]

By adding additional bit of different perspectives I have changed the role of perspective???? No understandeee

You started by saying that if perspective A is right, then perspective not A is wrong. Those are opposites. When I pointed out that, using your logic, if you believe both A and Not-A are right you end up believing they are both wrong. Nonsensical.

Rather than respond you provided an example of an entirely different logical process. Irrelevant.

By the way, "fair enough" is not an adequate response to a CFR.

In your first example, I was referring to the traditional or instinctual perspective of humans, that "If I'm right, others are wrong."

I don't think that anymore. You can be right, so can I.

Yes, I know you don't, and I've made that clear now in two posts. I was giving examples of the illogicality of "you can be right, so can I."

And again, CFRs are waiting.

[_Res Ipsa]

It looks to me as if judging the result is exactly what you are doing. Your whole pitch here seems to be something like: believing in things that are false isn't bad because the belief itself can have net positive effect. You can't make that pitch without judging the results. If all you were saying is that a person's beliefs affects their behavior, I don't think you would have gotten any pushback.

I don't think we normally take the time to judge the "good or bad" of a belief. Like, "Russia did it!!" While we don't know and therefore choosing to believe, are we reviewing the moral value of believing? Or do we just want the effect of it.

I didn't address what people normally do. I'm a specific position that I think you've taken. I am claiming that you cannot suggest that people should believe in false things because of their net effect without making a judgment.

But, I'm suggesting we really don't know what is true, but choose to believe things for the net benefit.

Why do you suggest that? In my experience, my brain doesn't even work that way. I know that if I walk into my coffee table, it's going too hurt and I'll get a bruise. At no time has my brain ever said anything like "regardless of whether or not the coffee table is there, is there a net good from believing it's not there? If so, let's believe its not there. You can suggest my brain actually flips a mental coin to decide what it believes, but that doesn't make it a valuable suggestion.

Take my previous example. Politics promotes ideas that very often complete BS because of the effect of it. "Don't like Trump? Let's investigate him so everyone who doesn't like him will think he a criminal." This past few years was literally overwhelming with all of the BS being promoted. And when it was proven fake, something else sprung up to create the same effect. Personally, I have come to the point I might reject an idea, not because I think its untruth, but maybe I don't want that effect in my life. With all of the BS being promoted, I simply don't want to think humans are so sick.

I don't think your example has anything to do with believing for effect. I think it shows taking actions for effect. I'm going to use a personal example rather than a political one. Part of my job is to make the best arguments I can in support of my client's position. I do that, not because the arguments are "true," but because of my duties to my client. I don't have to believe an argument to make it. That fact that I make the argument doesn't require me to believe it's true or that my client should win. Exactly the same with your example -- the fact that politicians say something doesn't mean they believe it. That has nothing to do with the proposition you raised: that is based on justifying believing something based on effect rather than truth. If I come to believe that my argument is a slam-dunk winner, I will end up giving my client bad advice when she asks about the strength of her case. And that is likely to cause harm. I can't justify that by saying that the effect telling her case is much stronger than it is because it will make her less nervous when she testifies at trial without making a judgment about how good or bad the effect of giving advice based on false facts would be.

I know a lot of people disagree, but I think that without religion, we would still be swinging in trees. Believing that God was angry with us, or wanted us to do something, has more or less brought us here. I don't think it has all been good, but the overall effect I think is.

Isn't the truth that you have absolutely no idea whether without religion we would be swinging from the trees or swinging from the stars? And the same is true for overall effect -- you have no idea what the world would have been without belief in God. So why think that? Is it that you like the story with the tiger better? Because that's what it kind of looks like from here. All of these paragraphs of mangled science look like a brain that has serious doubts about the existence of God and also desperately wants to believe in the existence of God. If you have to torture scientific knowledge to this degree to get the doubting part of your brain to confess that God is real, maybe you're on the wrong track. Maybe treating dreams and visions as true and meaningful and then bending reality to try and fit isn't the best way to go.

I have many ideas. I even agree with some other about the nature of man and how we got here. But can I prove it? No. If I was going to launch a nuke based on the question, "Did monkeys evolve religion, or did religion evolve monkeys?" I would hold off. I really cannot prove it. But, I do believe the religion evolved monkeys. I'm not desperate for God to exist. Really, I couldn't imagine life without him. But, my version of God is different then mainstream religion.

If monkeys had religion (for which there is no evidence), then it wouldn't be an either/or proposition. Natural selection can certainly select for behavior, and religion could certainly change behavior.

There was a movie I loved called the "Hog Father." The specters of the universe put out a hit on [Santa Claus] because believers were messing with the universe. But the end lesson, taught by the Grim Reaper was, "we teach the little lies so that people can believe the big lies. Because if you grind down the universe to dust you will not find one particle of honor, courage, hope, or loyalty.

Haven't seen the movie so I don't get the point. What big lies? I agree that if you grind "the universe" down, you won't find any of those things. God either.

By "big lies" the Grim Reaper meant the stuff we believe that makes life cool. Ideas like "countries, families, religions, honor, hope, courage" are basically lies we make up. We practice them to create other lies, like safety, security, property, ownership, borders, etc. The theme was that if the "Hog Father" (Santa) died, the sun would not rise the next day. The Grim Reaper explained that only a big ball of burning gas would come up. This implies, and I personally love this part, that everything we have is really based on a lie. We have mystical relationships with the moon, the wind, the eagles, the dolphin, and countless other things that have to be believed. The Great Pyramid is really just a pile of stones, unless you wonder about it and believe the history about it, knowing that whatever you believe is probably wrong.

So, why isn't God the biggest lie of all? God makes life cool, right? If you take the message of the movie seriously, then the mystical relationships you think you have with the moon, wind, eagles and dolphins are also lies, right? And God is the ultimate lie of all. So why do you think this movie is cool?

Some doctors have recently tried to prove the gender roles are purely imaginary, lies. Women are not the weaker sex, they just play that role. And men, are not really men, but rather females with a special marker gene that give them an alternative or Option B sex of equipment. For men to be men, they must pretend to be men.

Somehow, I doubt the accuracy of your description. Gender roles are Real2 -- labels given to observed types of behavior. The roles are real in that there appear to be different sets of behavior typically exhibited by men and women. They aren't lies. What might be a lie is that some or all of those behaviors are determined genetically. I'm not sure what you mean by "weaker sex," but I don't think anyone has shown that differences in physical strength between the average man and the average woman are caused by women playing a role, although I think a good case can be made that the roles exaggerate the extent of that difference. Your point about men is simply equivocating with labels.

Believing that we should be nice isn't a cosmic rule, and sometimes is actually destructive, but mostly it is good. The idea of "father" is made up. Nature, mostly doesn't care who the father is. Fathers have "evolved" out of the belief that we are committed to the mother. We still practice this idea, and not everyone does a good job. But its a "belief" that isn't necessarily based on truth.

I have the same problem understanding this that Gad has pointed out. You use different meanings of the term "belief" and treat them as all the same. But the fact that we believe things that are not true does not mean that, given the choice, we should believe false things.

Most words have multiple meanings. I have studied the word "brief" rather extensively. Wikipedia had some of my thoughts on the matter for almost ten years. (That's a competitive word on a global scale.)
To me, belief is a basically a thought form. In the brain, a belief isn't much different then a knowing. You can add metadata to a belief or knowing that could be conditional. Like, I know water will freeze IF the temperature is low enough and exposed long enough. I believe most politicians lie. They are really be both beliefs, thought forms in the brain. They are treated much the same. If it gets cold, I will assume exposed water will freeze. If a politician speaks, I'm looking for the lies.

The problem isn't your definition. The problem isn't that words have multiple definitions. The problem is equivocation -- switching meanings of a word mid sentence or paragraph.

What I meant by believing false things is that it might justify false or unproven information to create a thought form. To think you are right about something, you basically have to believe others that disagree are wrong. Many of us do this willingly, even eagerly, so they can believe they are right. The way I get around that sort of thing, and think that maybe I'm right, is I believe every perspective is valid. If it conflicts with me, it doesn't really mean that its wrong, but that we have a conflict. Sometimes, maybe its worth fighting over. Mostly, it doesn't really affect me. That people think I'm wrong, or crazy, doesn't fill my soda, or pay my bills. But, I get that they have thoughts, probably false, that justify their disrespect of me.

I understood what you meant. I'm saying you can't justify it without evaluating the effect of the thought form.

I also understand what you are describing, but I don't think you are actually doing what you described. At least in your posting so far. You don't treat every point of view as "valid." You attack scientific evidence and conclusions but defend the mystical and magical. And your mind trick is really a dodge. You're right -- to claim X when someone claims ~X generally means one is right and one is wrong. And that doesn't change just by tacking on "but your point of view is valid." Something in that point of view led the person to be wrong. This process of stating facts or that you know something or asserting something is a fact and then backing away may make you feel good, but the result from out here is a mess.

[_Amore]

SPG wrote:

Some doctors have recently tried to prove the gender roles are purely imaginary, lies. Women are not the weaker sex, they just play that role. And men, are not really men, but rather females with a special marker gene that give them an alternative or Option B sex of equipment. For men to be men, they must pretend to be men.

I agree with you in many ways, but stuff like the above concerns me. Have you fallen for insane herd mentality? Vagina-envy and hatred of all things masculine?

Are you suggesting you believe that gender is a lie - as if a man’s penis or a woman’s vagina are not objective facts? As if the brain and endocrine system that function uniquely in each gender - are lies?

Please tell me you haven’t fallen for lies that suggest little boys who find sticks and pretend they’re guns are told to pretend that...

[_JP]

We all move from believing one thing that's not true that makes us feel good to believing another thing that's not true that makes us feel good.

Mormonism isn't special in that regard. Move on. Focus on what makes you happy today, not what made you happy yesterday. You'll feel better.

[_Amore]

Res Ipsa, you say this as if I haven't basically admitted it. In my search for God, I haven't found the Mormon God. I have met Archangels, Michael included, but none of them brought up Mormonism.

But, I have found so much more. There is no shortage of stuff to believe in. In fact, I feel like a kid in a candy show, diabetes not withstanding. I was angry at God. Then I cursed God and went about trying to understand the world without God.

I didn't get far. A world without God made no sense to me. The more I tried to explain life without higher beings the more stupid it seemed.

I see so much more than what science tries to explain. Someone said that science admits they don't understand everything. But they don't even acknowledge stuff like the soul, memories of past lives, connection to higher beings through mediation, psychic visions of other beings.

I have tried to share my ideas and experiences with what I might consider parallel ideas or sciences. I am trying to discuss my ideas and perspective with a common language. I am not trying to convert anyone. But I have found a few people that seem to understand. I don't try to brain was them, they just seen to see what I see, in part.

That you guys think you have nailed me down and boxed me in, you haven't even come close. I admit I don't know much, but I believe a lot of things strongly enough I would be my life on.

Do I have doubts? Tons and tons. Do I want God to exist? Absolutely!

But one doubt I don't have: Is there a God? I could not find evidence that there wasn't a God. I could describe God several ways. But you cannot show someone God, they have to find him.

Well put, SPG.
God is just a 3-letter word to describe basically a higher good - but in many ways. Atheism tends to be dogmatic and illogical - picking the most ridiculous idea of God and beating it up as if they just took care of it once and for all.

You mentioned, “there is no shortage of stuff to believe in.” I agree - however, I can see how skepticism blinds to possibilities and can be quite paralyzing, boring and unmotivating. Yet, faith without reason tends to be misdirected.

[Guest]

I agree with you in many ways, but stuff like the above concerns me. Have you fallen for insane herd mentality? Vagina-envy and hatred of all things masculine?

Are you suggesting you believe that gender is a lie - as if a man’s penis or a woman’s vagina are not objective facts? As if the brain and endocrine system that function uniquely in each gender - are lies?

Please tell me you haven’t fallen for lies that suggest little boys who find sticks and pretend they’re guns are told to pretend that...

All things are relative, Amore. That includes penises and vaginas. it is all an illusion! You might think you have a vagina but that is just your perception and opinion, and the opinion of 7 billion other people. But so what? Your neighbor may believe and perceive that you have a penis and Bam! You now have a penis. It's a fact... that is how truth is created. You want a penis? Simply believe you have one. Bam! It's now a fact that you have a penis. It doesn't matter that 7 billion people might disagree with you. You want a vagina? You can have one of those too. Hell , in spg's world there are no objective facts so you can have a penis and a vagina at the same time simply just by believing you do!

Facts are not facts. Truth is not truth. That's what I have learned the last two days