Posts by HORansome
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I have to agree. "New Zealander" is not an ethnicity (well, it might be if we use it to refer to Māori, but we have an ethnic label for Māori; it's "Māori") and should not be on the census as such (it would really screw over the ability for people to infer large chunks of quite important information from the census). New Zealander may be a nationality but ethnicity, no. To quote Wikipedia:
An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and a tradition of common ancestry (corresponding to a history of endogamy)
Frankly, I'm quite happy with Pāekhā.
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The Logic of the Conditional Apology
Any apology in conditional form expresses a relationship of necessity and sufficiency with respect to antecdent and consequent claims. In the conditional apology the apology itself is the necessary consequent of some antecedent which suffices for an apology.
Valid forms of the Conditional Apology are:
Affirming the Antecedent
P1. If you are offended, then I am sorry.
P2. You are offended.
Therefore,
C. I am sorry.Denying the Consequent
P1. If you are offended, then I am sorry.
P2. I am not sorry.
Therefore,
C. You are not offended.Invalid forms of the Conditional Apology are:
Denying the Antecedent
P1. If you are offended, then I am sorry.
P2. You are not offended.
Therefore,
C. I am not sorryFallacious Affirming the Consequent
P1. If you are offended, then I am sorry.
P2. I am sorry.
Therefore,
C. You are offendedThe rarely used Biconditional Apology is also an option:
"I am sorry if and only if you are offended"
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Any student loan correspondence I get seems to orginate in another dimension which is not a logically possible world; the mathematics of these pieces of paper I get sent resemble the architecture of Ry'leh.
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I'm not belittling people's right to believe what they want, but there is not any rational basis, especially in the early 21st Century, for someone to rationally and logically argue that we were created and are guided by a supernatural being.
This is the problem, though; not every theist believes that conjunction "we were created AND are guided by a supernatural being" and not every theist is out to confirm their hypotheses; there are people who came to theism via argument and are not naturally presupposed to it (witness C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to theism, as one of many examples; people do, it seems, rationally choose to believe in the existence of a personal god (or gods)).
I am an atheist (and happy with it), but this condescending "Theists are irrational" vibe the New Atheists give off (especially when they tend to also be naive believers in Science who know nothing, say, of the Duhem-Quine Thesis or the theory-laden nature of observation and inference) really is doing the movement more harm than not. We're not exactly modelling rational argument when we mischaracterise the other side as irrational hillbilly locals who are committed to views that most of them don't hold, are we?
Also, Darwin was not the first evolutionist; it was a thesis that was widely accepted, even within Christianity, as being likely true. (Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, had been, for example, promoting evolutionary theories, and the thesis can be found in some references in Aristotle). Darwin merely (I say advisedly, since it was actually a remarkable discovery) worked out the mechanism (Natural Selection), which was also widely accepted as being likely true within Christianity. Creationism is, statistically, a minority view within Christianity; most theists believe in some kind of evolutionary story with either a god-thesis for abiogenesis or god-guided evolution (ala the thesis of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).
There is, of course, a secondary point here, about the sociology of Science, which, when you get into it, does rather suggest that scientist are nowhere near as rational, as inferential agents, as we would like to characterise them as being.
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Mostly the aforementioned seem to have an edge, simply because debate requires the application of rationale, whereas religion requires that you suspend rational thought processes.
Look, even as an atheist, I find that statement offensive.
Do you really want to throw out, as evidence, the bodies of knowledge developed by theists, in celebration of their faith, which looked for the patterns behind nature? Brother Mendel and his peas, for example? I'll be the first in line to say that Christianity, especially Catholicism, is responsible for a whole mess of (on-going) evils in our world, but religious belief is not prima facie irrational. Certain modes of theistic belief can be, but not all and it is not even clear that even most are. To say that religious belief requires you to suspend rationality is, for example, to claim that the original scholastics, those who said that religious belief had to be based in rational enquiry, and the work of a large number of Christian ethicists, like Aquinas, duns Scotus and Kant (as examples) were irrational.
This latter group of ethicists is particularly informative as to just how rational religious belief can be. If we track Christian ethics through Augustine to Aquinas (stopping off to see the developments of William of Ockham and John duns Scotus along the way) we can see that Christian ethics was subject to revision, argument and all the features of rational enquiry.
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Like you, Andin, I have a theistic past; I was all set to enter the seminary and become a Roman Catholic priest, until I had an opportunity to do my MA, which lead to the erosion of my theism (I was still being actively courted to take up a vocation by the Diocese of Auckland four years ago).
So, I can say that when it come to making claims about what theists believe, both Hitchens and Dawkins act like they know nothing of general theistic modes of belief (I can't speak for Hitchens, but Dawkins has been pressed on this issue and simply defines away the moderate Christians as being not properly Christian (the One True Scotsman Fallacy, if you will. There's a reason why, on matters of atheism, that he's more popular in the States than he is in the UK). To paraphrase John Mortimer, I long for the time when atheists actually engaged theistic belief in debate rather than played to their own choir.
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That sounds really pretentious, I do realise.
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Really? From the material I've read, and the debates I've been to (and friends I've listened to ad nauseam) that second paragraph actually does describe a lot of what is going on in the New Atheism (especially Hitchins and Dawkins, who are amongst the loudest atheists). I realise that's anecdotal evidence, but, well, most of my colleagues would agree, and we are the peer group, when it comes to the Philosophy of Religion, that theists and atheists need to convince.
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Although I'm loath to quote the Huffington Post (given its startling support for pseudoscience), this article on debates between atheists and theists is just the bee's knees.
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I'm glad the rampant hypocrisy of Aaron Bhatnagar has been pointed out.
Also, has anyone noticed that ACT's Peter Tashkoff looks like famed horror writer, Garth Marenghi? I find the resemblance very suspicious.