Posts by BenWilson
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I'm pretty much in agreement with Kracklite on God, agnostic if I must be purely logical, atheist for any really practical purposes. But I'm using the words in the same way as him, and there can be dispute about that. Get around the dispute by just elaborating which one you are, and you can continue without arguing about the meaning of a word. I doubt any resolution is likely in a real good faith discussion between people of genuinely opposing viewpoints, though. Mostly because I've never seen it happen, in many such discussions, some of which have been in good faith. Different starting points converge to different solutions - if you start by presuming God exists, and you define God as logic personified, then how can it possibly be disproved? The argument that such definitions are circular only bothers people who haven't starting from presuming the existence. Also, ironically, belief in induction has a similarly circular source, as Hume showed, so scientific realists aren't immune to this criticism themselves. Belief that the future will resemble the past, based on the fact that it always has before, is clearly circular. So the person starting from believing in God might very well see a valid scientific disproof of God as a logical disproof of science.
Which is why it's generally a scientifically fruitless discussion - I'd think scientists would simply ignore the question as far too vague to bother with, in terms of actually trying for scientific disproof or such. They're likely to have an opinion, as they do on unproven scientific claims too. There were plenty of opinions about the Higgs boson's existence last year. They're now a bit stronger for the "it exists" side. I'd expect scientists, just by the nature of what they do, to mostly be atheists, but I can't see any inherent contradiction if they're not.
So the idea that "strong atheists" have some aspect of faith about them, isn't too far from the mark, IMHO. "Weak atheists", not so much. The strong atheist is stabbing into the dark about God, just as true believers are. If I was forced to stab, I'd stab the same way as the strong atheist. But I'm not forced to stab, so I consider myself agnostic, or perhaps a weak atheist. Maybe if some scientific Inquisition put me in a cell, demanding to know which way my sentiments ran or face the thumbscrews, I'd say that of course I was with them. It's an informed stab, at least. Given the way that God is often defined circularly, it hardly matters if it exists. Then again, if the scientist performing the Inquisition happened to have a cross around their neck....hmmm. Agnostic. Only safe position.
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Legal Beagle: Before the fall, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I could work out a formula for the probability, but won't, as I haven't got that much spare time.
I'm guessing it's going to be close to 1/2^(number of elections). So getting a run of 5 is 1/2^5 = 1/32. Not that astronomical, but still unlikely. Interesting that it happened, but well within "these things happen".
ETA: Rough reasoning is that most of the time, National's got about a half in half chance of being the once benefiting from the rounding. So it's much like a string of coin flips.
ETA2: Hang on, the chance is more like 1/(number of parties)^(number of elections). Hmmm, yes, that's much more astronomical.
ETA3: Or something....I'm not really sure what the odds of being the 120th quotient is each time is. But how they stack up to a probability over a series of independent elections is pretty straightforward. Is their chance proportional to (their size)/(the total size of all parties)? If so, my first guess wasn't too far wrong.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Fair enough, Craig, I wasn't sure who you were talking about, and it is one way of reading Tess' argument. I'll give her more credit for now. I think she's hit on one of the classic liberal paradoxes - "Anything goes means everything stays". In a pure sense, legal marriage should hardly matter at all, responsibility for the various functions that have adhered to it could be distributed without any of the pair (or more) bonding irrelevances. But practically, for now, marriage does matter, it does affect people greatly whether they are married or not, and therefore the widening of the scope of marriage is a highly progressive move, even if it's not the pure liberal dream. There's a whole 'nother debate about why it is that married people have any special treatment or responsibilities at all. For now, they simply do, so lets stop excluding gays from that. Furthermore, even if marriage were just a legally meaningless word, a ritual that a church could set its own rules about, I'm still don't think it's OK for them to exclude gays. The church is simply too big and powerful to let it hand down the hurt like that. It's time it stopped.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Tess Rooney,
But I really, truly, deeply, feel that God has defined marriage and we would be wrong to change it.
Does God make definitions? Really? If God said 1+1=3, by definition, would that make it so? Does God saying 1+1=2 by definition make it so either, really? Isn't it so anyway, no matter what God thinks about that? This is a really, really common mistake in religious thinking, IMHO, that God defines things like marriage and morality. Whether God exists or not, they still can't make the illogical logical, the false true. At best they're a guide to the truth, the scriptures could point to the truth, maybe. But evidence to the contrary, is, I'm sorry to say it, evidence against the scriptures. If you could show that the existence of God implied 1+1=3, you'd have found a logical disproof of God's existence.
Marriage is just a word, it describes a relationship humans can have. If you say that it's man with woman by definition you're only arguing about the meaning of a word, not the validity of an institution. And yet there is a subtle conflation that seems to happen at that point, that having got fussy over the meaning of a word, that therefore implies that some practical outcomes are obvious. They're not - even if we decided that the word "marriage" (which I'm sure does not occur anywhere in the ancient scriptures, English having not come into existence), has to mean what you say, then can we please just use another word? This argument wastes time, and fudges something that leads to an outcome of oppression. Lets just say if the bill passes, then we've got mharriage now. It's just like marriage, only better because everyone is allowed.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Tess Rooney,
You're taking an interesting position, Tess. I can see why Craig suggested it was concern trolling, you're suggesting that marriage sanctioned by the state isn't liberal enough. Perhaps there's truth in that. If I'm understanding you, you're saying "if people want to get married, under whatever arrangement they like, they should be allowed, and no one should be able to say yeah or nay. This includes getting a square old Catholic marriage, which should still be allowed, as a private cult, to refuse people on whatever pretext they like".
If the main concern of marriage laws, support and child-rearing, were decoupled, then this would be a more direct way of circumventing all the silly rules around marriage. It would indeed become a ritual of significance limited to the adherents.
My main objection to this is that social progress seems to come one step at a time, so I hope you're not suggesting any progressive moves should be forestalled because they don't measure up to an ideal, and that we should thus stay in the highly discriminatory state we're in. But honestly, I don't read that out of you, and I thank you for your contributions. It's always good to get a reminder that there are other perspectives.
A second objection is that if you allow Catholicism to dictate all terms of it's own marriage, you are really abandoning all the Catholics who are currently oppressed by those terms. That people could disassociate with Catholicism is the obvious comeback, and it certainly seems to be what a lot of Catholics think is appropriate - that gays should just piss off, or at the very least, shut the fuck up. Considering how enormous the Catholic church is, how many people are under its sway, and how important it is in the lives of devotees, I simply can't agree that the state should never be allowed to interfere internally to right certain wrongs. There really are people suffering from the Catholic oppression of gays, and in this country at least, we can do somewhat to reduce that, and being moral people, we should do it. Religion gets its hooks into people from a very young age, so it's not like freedom to choose really exists practically. You get raised in a cult, you think like the cult, even if you are, by chance, gay. I don't think that gays should have to suffer disconnection from their entire society, every time they come out. It's bad enough that that happens anyway (to some extent) due to human prejudice, without actually letting an institution make it a formal position.
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Break a leg.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Danielle,
I don't really want to be "one flesh" with my husband. It sounds like it would be terribly inconvenient.
Isn't it meant to sound just a bit rude?
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Lilith __,
I think Ben is right: now we know what the risks are, we can mitigate them.
It's a possibility, anyway. I don't really have an opinion about whether it's appropriate. It would be appropriate to research it, is the most I'd say.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Catholic priest who married two of my friends was terrible. Banged on about church dogma and even had a rant about the evils of same-sex marriage.
Yup, I heard a lot of "blah blah, holy, blah blah, sacrament, blah blah, God" at my wedding. But I wasn't refused, despite being at the atheist end of agnostic. He wasn't warm to me either, but he was even more of a grumpy old bugger to the devout Catholics, speaking harshly during the rehearsal to some of them for appearing to enjoy themselves. I presumed that was just how things went down in their church. Couldn't see the appeal myself, but it was important to my wife. The venue was pretty, and free, which was handy, since it was an expensive time of my life.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Hebe,
I reckon that if we are going to stay here we must sit lightly on the land in every way.
That's one approach. Another is to directly engineer solutions to overcome the geographic troubles, possibly at great expense.
Nothing can stop that: 20 seconds and it's gone.
Not necessarily. If it's raised enough, it could be entirely unaffected. In fact, if liquefaction is constantly happening, it would make sense to build transport infrastructure that is impervious to it.
ETA: Since mentioning Amsterdam is popular when discussing well planned transport, it's worthwhile remembering that half of their country would be flooded if it weren't protected by enormous earthworks. The Dutch engineered the solutions to their swampy little country, and IIRC, the Dam is full of trams.
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