Reg the Fronkey Farmer

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 2,600 total)
  • Author
  • #37521

    Have a great week everyone!


    Here is a video on the reactions of people from around the world on what they think of the U.S. health care system.

    I post it as a follow up to the discussions on the topic we had recently. It is from the NYT so might be pay-walled (Yes, I spend $2 pm for it!)


    I have no problem with anyone suffering a loss of social standing or having awards revoked. I think Dawkins “question” was more ill-informed than deliberately trying to be antagonistic.

    I find that the “outrage” was driven more by the shouts from SJW’s than it was by the reaction of the trans community. I am not trying to defend anyone but some of these cancellations seems more Judge Roy Bean with “you’ll get a fair trial followed by a first class hanging” rather than inviting “offenders” to a engage with anyone offended by what has been said so that more people could come to understand the issue.


    @simon but it’s silly to say that this leads to non-believers having to actively suppress their innate religious feelings. We just don’t.

    I fully agree Simon. We do not have any innate religious feelings. Humans are prone to magical thinking, to seeing patterns where none exist and to making up an answer when the correct one is not yet discovered. We do not have a “god gene” and more than we have a “UFO gene” or “ghost gene”.


    Strange the “Dear Muslima” case about Dawkins and Rebecca Watson has resurfaced here. It was in a hotel in Dublin at the World Atheist Convention in 2011, organized by Atheist Ireland and which I attended. It went from zero to Internet outrage in a very short time frame, with many commentators falsely reporting on it as if they were there. I have no more to say on the topic.


    I made a decision about 10 years ago to not use social media. I have no Twitter or Instagram accounts. I do have a Facebook account but it is only to get atheist news. I have “no friends” there and absolutely don’t want any. I did have but I “de-friended” them all. Apparently being an atheists upsets people who only friended me to tell me I am wrong about their god. I still get requests but never accept any of them. I think I have posted about 5 comments in 8 years.

    People tell me I am missing out. I don’t think so. I don’t miss the faux outrage, the incessant idiotic comments by people who think that their opinion is important even thought the majority of anything I have ever read by them is moronic.

    Now most of the regular news sites run stories that are trending on social media. But it all about outrages and storms.  I have met so many people who get their news on Facebook and get annoyed with me for  telling them that they are talking bollox. I do it deliberately when they start. Today a seemingly normal person suddenly started ranting about Bill Gates vaccines that are going to kill people or some such FB shit they read and believed. Did you know gullible is the only word not in the English dictionary?, I asked.

    You think Bill Gates wants to kill millions of potential customers? Not a very good business plan is it, building all these computer products and having no buyers because he has altered their DNA to kill them off? You really believe that yeah?

    The outrage and offense I caused!! I intend to cause as much of it as I can every time one of those muppets start ranting at me. Bring it on 🙂


    I think it was foolish of Richard Dawkins to say, apparently, that women shouldn’t complain about getting minor sexual offences against them, because it’s not as bad as a full-blown rape.

    @simon – That is not what he said (or tweeted). I remember the incident very well as I had recently met him.

    Here is some of the reporting from Atheist Ireland at the time.

    In recent years it seems that there are people out there waiting to be outraged and offended. This has led to people jumping onto social media bandwagons to “Do something about it”. But they don’t. No meaning discussion follows and very few lessons are learned. It just seems to go straight to “Cancel them now!” Well fuck that.


    @unseenSo, does a MWI theorist maintain that even subatomic events are subject to it as well? Does every subatomic event have one (or, why not?, more) alternatives, each in a different universe?

    Yes, I suppose the theorist does as the wave function Ψ defines all the possible states a quantum system to be expressed in. It is only when we observe it that we locate it. But in measuring it we only get one outcome when in fact all other potential outcomes have occurred too (each in another “world”).

    I think we will never see these other worlds because we only see the world created by the unique outcome of each observation we make. (I think “interaction” is a better word than “observation”). It is the combination all the observations or interactions we make that creates our reality, our unique world. All these interactions have a relationship to each other. They do not exist independently of each other once we observe them. Their properties, as described by this interaction, are what gives them existence in our reality or world.

    Note: the MWI is different to the Multiverse hypothesis. In the former the many worlds are parallel but we only ever see one reality. In the latter, each Universe had its own “Big Bang” event.



    That would be a good reason to shy away from atheism.

    It is what happens. But it does not give any validity to your beliefs. “I believe “X” because I am too scared of it not being true is, to say the least, a cop out from reality. It is intellectually bankrupt. Faith is not an investigative tool. It is the white flag of surrender to the beliefs of others. This is why they elevate faith above reason. It cannot survive interrogation so they introduce blasphemy laws or demand we respect their beliefs just because they cherish them.


    The premise of the Many World Interpretation (as per the Helgoland book reviewed today) and as I once asked Dr. Bob about, (unanswered), is to take Schrodinger’s seriously. The probability of his cat being in either state can be expressed as a wave function (Greek letter ψ and Ψ). But the wave function is a real entity. So, the cat can be in a superposition of dead&alive. When you observe the cat, it is interacting with your own real Ψ wave which splits in two. One where you see the cat as alive and one where you see it as being dead. Both are real according to the MWI. There are now two “Worlds” because you looked at the cat. In QM this is a proper theory. It may sound crazy but it is not the scientists that are crazy but quantum theory itself.

    Things have moved on from here and theorists are now giving attention to the “relational interpretation” of quantum theory. Very briefly, scientists and their measuring instruments are all part of nature. What Quantum Theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature. The world we observe is a continuous interaction.  OK, I guess that is as clear as mud so I will return to it later.


    Father Simon did not know for sure how many Indonesian people had chose atheism as there is no data.

    The problem is not that there is no data on how many atheists there are in Indonesia but that the priest considers atheism to be a choice. If he understood what atheism was, i.e., a lack of belief, then he would know this.

    For most believers it does appear as a choice as they have all presupposed the existence of their god and all “knowledge” they have about this god is an a priori deduction. From theists it is like saying there are two boxes on a table, one called Faith and one called Atheism. They take the Faith box and we take the Atheist box because we choose to. But there is only one box on the table. It is called Faith. They pick it up but we just don’t.

    He talks of studying “divine philosophy” whatever in the name of his god that is. It should probably read “Theology” and\or “Verbose Tautologies for Christian Apologetics” (my term). Modern philosophy gives no consideration to the existence or nature of any god. Hobbes, Descartes and especially Kant destroyed any chains linking Theology to Philosophy by destroying the standard theological arguments (or proofs as theists like to call them).

    Once you do a critical study of atheism, you will find the truth.

    Having studied German philosophy so deeply he seems to have overlook Leibnitz who asked if it is reasonable to believe that God created Earth as the “best of all possible worlds”.

    The good thing is that Indonesia has a religious situation. Churches and mosques, for example, are always packed with the faithful.

    To continue in the philosophical vein, I think it was Socrates who said “mere numbers do not make a belief valid or add any wisdom to it” (badly paraphrased by me).

    He believes that atheism can never survive. “None of its arguments are reassuring,” Father Simon said.

    And that sentence alone shows why most people cling to their faith. They need the reassurance of its warm cotton blanket. That is the heart of almost all religious belief.

    “Once you do a critical study of atheism, you will find the truth. And those who find the truth will be freed from fear and become mature in faith.”

    Yes, religious indoctrination followed by years of confirmation bias makes people “mature in faith”. But faith leads to intellectual immaturity because it weakens the ability to think critically.  If he had actually done “a critical study of atheism” he would have had to challenge his own beliefs. But he is too afraid to because he would no longer have the “reassuring” belief that he will become an immortal, which in turn is the theists biggest intellectually immature belief.

    Valar Morghulis


    Have a great week everyone!


    What is the point of rhetorical questions?


    Thanks Jake, I enjoy the trains of thought I end up on. Maybe not “freethinking” but I never know the destination when I board the train 🙂

    Can’t stop the traffic in my mind.


    Yes, the conservative right would play the automatic “call it socialism” card. In the long run these ideas benefit society. In economic terms the nation improves its labor force (factors of production) so the newly housed can now take up steady jobs and pay taxes back into the pot that gave them the leg up. They cost the health service less too. Society also becomes healthier as their “happiness index” goes up. Give it a few minutes thought and more benefits will spring to mind.

    When I was in my early twenties I worked in a University as an economic forecaster and any modelling we did to predict “socialist policies” always had a positive outcome on the stats in the medium to long run.  At least these ideas are worth trying because the “war on poverty and homelessness” is not working because it is not being fought with the right weapons.

    The “war on drugs” has failed yet the same right wingers continue with prohibition ideology and a punishment mentality. At one point the number of people in jail in the USA for non-violent drug offenses exceeded the total prison population of Europe (for all crimes). They are often paid a pittance to find themselves exploited into manufacturing goods as part of their “rehab”. (So Red, have you been rehabilitated?). I do not see this as Capitalism. It is a form of modern-day slavery where “greed is good” and the few get richer. Many of their “workers” are released with no skills and no path back to regular society. What happens many of them? They end up homeless and get into meth or opioids and become a serious burden on a less cohesive society.

    What if some more places tried the Portuguese policy of decriminalizing all drugs? The Right would need a few shots of strong brandy to calm themselves down. Yet these policies do work. In the long run (or even medium) crime falls, police forces deal with “real” crimes, less HIV incidents, fewer needless deaths of young people and criminal drug trafficking gangs are, overnight, without customers (not quiet but close enough). Many of these people (when addiction is treated as a disease not a crime) recover and re-join society as taxpayers! Give it another few minutes and you will come up with more benefits to society and to the economy.

    A similar type of case can be made for School and Education systems around the globe where many Savage Inequalities still exist and have decision makers in positions of power,  who  never seem capable of thinking “outside the box” and who have no concept of the Matthew Effect.

    I am smoking a spliff at the moment. It is an offense here but most police don’t care. But if prosecuted I can be barred from traveling to the USA, where I travel to (pre-Covid), because I have a capitalist business interest in a Californian cannabis farm!  Traditional thinking has not worked. New ideas are not radical, they are just different, like imagining an ocean between the waves.

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 2,600 total)