Posts by BenWilson
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What about the Thetan who utters the words "I am a liar". Antinomy?
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to UglyTruth,
Should have said this a while ago, but can we take this to the other thread where it's at least barely relevant.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
So, you don’t really mean aliens, you mean human-like beings that you can’t show any evidence for, right?
No, I mean aliens. If you want more detail, fine. Thousands of them can fit on the head of a pin. They are immortal and come from a galaxy far, far away. They are fond of the color green. Country and western music seems to relax them.
You’ve now backtracked from “aliens that have taken over my brain” to “aliens that exist”.
No. I'm still on the aliens that have taken over your brain. They could exist. Admit it.
you are assuming that the Constitution Act was effective in order to argue that NZ legislation is effective.
Yes, I believe that the laws passed by the NZ parliament are the laws of the land, and every court, judge, lawyer, and police officer in the land will back me up on that one. That's about as effective as it gets.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
You are ascribing human qualities to the unknown, which is why I said there was no purpose
Yup, it's my story. I get to define these aliens how I like. It's on you to show why they don't exist, in a way that doesn't also refute your own imaginary friend. If you're still keen on asserting the irrationality of refusing to believe in God. My point is that it's equally irrational not to believe my made up story. You can't produce a shred of physical evidence to dispute it. You have to admit it's a possibility. And that's as much of your story as I'll admit. There could be a God that is unknowable, has not influence on human affairs, can't be proved right or wrong. And also aliens could have abducted you, altered your brain, and used you for a silly joke. They're both either rational to believe on grounds of impossibility of knowing for absolutely certain that they're false, or they're both rational to disbelieve on the grounds of there being no evidence at all for them.
So which will you choose? Occam's razor, or unlimited silliness? Both are viable belief systems.
the NZ parliament is not sovereign.
No, really, it is.
Money quote:
In passing the Constitution Act 1986 (effective 1 January 1987), New Zealand “unilaterally revoked all residual United Kingdom legislative power.” New Zealand, as of 1987, is a free-standing constitutional monarchy whose parliament has unlimited sovereign power.
Parliament here could pass a law requiring you to swear on the Koran, or that you should perform sacred rites with virgins and chickens, if they could get it through the votes. They won't, of course.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to UglyTruth,
No, it’s more about ambiguity in language.
The idea of the oath is not particularly ambiguous. It's not important who it is to. What is important is that you swear it. Then you can get busted for lying under oath. That makes courtrooms places where people fear to be caught lying.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
Because in the context of common law it has been acknowledged to exist – the state is not telling the truth when it asserts otherwise.
The state has the right in this country to entirely redefine the law. If it doesn't want to make the source of promises something that people in large numbers will not find in the least bit frightening or compelling, then it is very sensible to offer an alternative. There is no difference in the way the different kinds of oaths are treated whatsoever. You can swear to almighty God, you can swear on your mother's grave, you can swear on your heart bursting, you can swear to a court. It's all the same. Because no one else can ever know about the sincerity of your oath, whether you actually care whether God is offended, or your mum rolls over in her grave, or that you actually think your heart might burst, or that you might just be gambling that the court will not discover your lies. None of that matters. What matters is that having sworn, any lies that are discovered are treated more severely. The purpose of the oath is to discourage lies. Who the oath is to is utterly, utterly irrelevant. In the past a lot of people were scared of lying to God (or at least being seen to), and felt no strange incongruity at swearing to Him, since they believed He exists. But this is not the case for a huge number of people now. So the custom has changed. Get over it.
your hypothetical example has no purpose..
No, I told you the purpose. The aliens are making fun of you. They chortle in their amazing ships at your every utterance. Only an omniscient person could be sure that it is not so. Are you, in fact, omniscient?
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Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to Sacha,
may not mean what you have been deluded into believing it does..
Thanks to John Key, the meaning of refute has actually changed. It is now synonymous with dispute, and there is no word for the original meaning. Do you refute this?
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to UglyTruth,
The atheism of the civil law is widespread
Thank God! (I'm not actually literally thanking God).
Jurare est Deum
Yodagu adagare WRODAGONG! #$%&! 45. Imp. Doc. Elseif {ASSERT!=FACT}
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
Because you don’t believe that there is such a thing as an afterlife?
I don't think you know anything about it, even if it does exist, which I doubt.
Like the idea of having a conscience? Both are contentious ideas for the NZ state.
No, nothing like that. Consciences clearly do exist. Natural rights, maybe not.
My focus here is natural rights as they exist within the common law
Their existence is contentious.
The state doesn’t acknowledge the source of natural rights
Sensible state. Why acknowledge the source of something that might not even exist?
Denying that a divine being exists is pretty irrational, considering that the denial implies omniscience on the part of the denier.
Denying aliens have taken over your brain and turned you loose as an amusing joke follows the same logic. Do you deny that has happened? If so, why? Rinse and repeat the same question, but with the magic poo-monster of Asgardtrothianosis.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to andin,
Sorry but capitalism is, at the moment, standing in the way of change
OK, fair enough, I'm using the word very loosely, because it is a very loose word. By capitalism I'm really just meaning a system in which people's ownership of capital can be individual or in small groups. And I don't think that particular part of the system has to disappear before there can be any improvement. But you're right that at our particular point in it, it's going backwards on some important measures and obsession with a strongly neoliberal flavour of it is majorly contributing to that, and we can probably look forward to quite a few more years before that winds up.
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