[extropy-chat] Putting God to Rest

[Mike Dougherty]

On 4/23/07, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at comcast.net> wrote:
> No!  It is the opposite of wishful thinking isn't it?  This is just what
> the theist want you to say, in their completely twisted and lying way.
>
> Atheists are the ones with truly "wishful thinking" and true faith and

> completely overcome much of it right?  It also just so happens that our
> beliefs are much more than "wishful thinking" and futile faith or hope
> right?

> Damien Broderick wrote:
> > At 09:10 AM 4/23/2007 -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote:
> >> So what is it called if you believe in a higher order of being than we
> >> are currently capable of understanding and through the inductive
> >> process believe there will always be a higher order no matter how
> >> exponential growth evolves our understanding?
> > Wishful thinking? Category mistake?

Wow, it is difficult to accept that any of us are communicating here.
"wishful thinking" was use by Damien as a put down (as I took it) and
Brent twisted the same words and took it as a label to support.  How
will it ever be possible to convey abstract meaning from sentences if
we don't have a common understanding of the meaning of the simplest
words.

The quote from me (above) was asking about defining a term or
qualifying a label.  I was amazed to see that mathematical induction
is not scientific enough for some of the knee-jerk atheists on this
list.  If you have an argument against the inductive hypothesis that
there exists a state of being that exceeds our current understanding
of humanity, then please deconstruct it and enlighten me.  Know that I
will also assume you would be suffering from the perceptual disorder
that you believe yourself to be that transcendent being who can
explain yourself from the pinnacle of human understanding.

Earlier in this thread Damien claimed that "Buddhists are atheists."
I can't disagree with that.  I have to wonder though if that is also
suggesting that Buddhists don't believe in transcendental ideas.  You
can take away the limited view of the ego-ist anthropic superpower
named "God" - but the notion of "something more than this" is (imo) as
fundamental and obvious as "there is no largest integer"

But if this is suffering from a category mistake, then I don't want to
be indoctrinated into accepting this wysiwyg existance is the most we
can hope for.