I would say doing it right was doing it according to the amount of time, sunrise to sunset, you'd get in Mecca (or Jerusalem if you're that way inclined). If not any Muslim Arctic explorer is buggered.

I phrased it poorly. Octavious phrased it better.

Nah, I knew exactly what you meant. I thought I'd just copy it, tweak the words slightly, and pretend I said it first ;).

Nope.

My point is that the purpose of Ramadan isn't to walk as close to the edge as you can, it's to challenge yourself to be faithful to your religion. If you aren't Muslim, then I don't know why you would partake unless you just feel like starving yourself.

Muslims eat more food during Ramadan than any other month.

http://www.onislam.net/english/health-and-science/health/436138-ramadan-month-of-fasting-or-month-of-feasting.html

Lol yet another example of Putin blaming an ENTIRE religion for the actions of a few followers.
Lent is about abstaining from worldly goods, and spending more time with God. In no way should a Christian ever boast about lent, if you go for example to a party during lent, you should accept whatever the host gives you instead of being a douche and going like "sorry, I can't eat the food you spent hours preparing cause I'm a self righteous prick".
Secondly, lent is very good for the body, being a vegan for a short time gives your body a break from dealing with meat and alcohol and animal products.
Rammadan, however is pretty dumb. You starve yourself for the day, only so that you can eat before going to sleep and then sleeping with a full belly (very bad).

ILN - You should ask Putin if he is a rapist. After all, there are teachers that are rapists, and Putin is involved in the Education system...THEREFORE...by Putin's own logic, he is, indeed a rapist and a pedophile. He can not deny it

"ENTIRE religion for the actions of a few followers. "

Right, a "few" followers.

If it's only a few followers then why isn't there a movement to condemn these heretics for bragging about lent "sacrifices"? Why don't Christians protest the stores and restaurants that exploit lent for commercial purposes? Because they're too busy slut shaming, right.

You can't on one hand go around claiming about how Christians are so much more righteous than Muslims because lent is a 'private affair' and then insist that all Christians should be treated as individuals. If you oppose collectivizing all groups then you have to do so even when people praise Christians. Of course you won't, because you don't really oppose collectivizing groups. This is just a ruse.

So I'm just wondering.... if they have entire months dedicated to "increased worship" like ramadan, why can't they have entire months where they just kinda let everything happen however... like a whole month where you just are kinda like "fuck allah, I do what I want."

Won't that also make you holier or w/e when you return to his love and glory afterwords? seems legit.

3 days in, it's starting to get easier. The first day was the worst.

Regarding all the conversation about the stupidity of religion, my experience has shown me that my atheist friends, despite all their knowledge of science, their quest for sources and their genuine love for C Sagan, R Dawkins & R Feinnman, often fall short in moral and philosophical areas. For example, most of them are materialist, and believe that pleasure is the goal of life. I have what you'd call a spiritual atheist friend, who is into physics and often tells me how atheists can be as "good", or better than religious people, but even he does not give to charity (talks about volunteering but never gets round to doing it), buys the latest smartphones and tablets and things like that.

Of course, not all religious people are devout, and there are a lot of Muslims who are obsessed with the latest Samsung Galaxy S5, but I see a deficiency in the atheists that non-religion seems to create. Perhaps atheists need to be more religious and more spiritual, even if they don't believe in nonmaterial concepts.

Yet empirical studies show that your impression of atheists is off-base.

http://www.livescience.com/20005-atheists-motivated-compassion.html

How much do you want to bet that the Christians here will not say a word about Synpapse issuing collectivist/essentialist pronouncements about the moral character of atheists?

You can't have an empirical study about science vs religion by a science journal.

Also, I just read that, it doesn't say anything about the giving to charity, only about the motivations for doing so. This in fact agrees with my analysis of my friend "talking" about being charitable, but not doing so very often. And such a person would arrogantly write in a survey that he was compassionately driven to give to charity.

http://connectedtogive.org/reports/

Not that it'll matter, but your impression about so-called 'charitable giving' is also off-base. When factoring in the amount of money which simply goes to profit official church organizations , which for whatever reason is included in 'charitable donation totals', religious people do not donate to charity any more than non-religious people.

"You can't have an empirical study about science vs religion by a science journal."

Yes you can, by definition. Scientific journals publish studies using empiricism. Religion doesn't believe in empiricism. But thanks for rejecting out of hand anything that doesn't confirm your bias.

You can't quantify it, at all. Your attempt to do so is amusing.

If, for example, religious people take people into their home instead of giving to charity, it wouldn't be measured on your scale. That's why I brought up the whole topic based upon my experiences. There isn't a study you can bring to support this.

I've also travelled to many religious countries where I've been treated charitably. There was no census-taker around to monitor such activity. You might despair at the idea that you need to have a conversation based upon faith in the other person's anecdotes, but that's life.

"There isn't a study you can bring to support this."

They're much more credible than your random and unsubstantiated anecdotes. Survey data has been done for a long, long, time and has very venerable track record. I trust Pew much more than I trust Synapse's impressions on the internet.

You cannot, (you think you can, but that doesn't matter) refute someone's life experiences through studies. That's a lesson that was tough for me to learn, but krellin helped me along the way, and that's the reason why liberal news sources often fail. You can publish an infinite amount of studies on equality between races, but you can't refute the fact that a person's house was robbed by black people 5 times out of 5.

I'm saying this for your benefit, and I hope you'll listen. It is a tough lesson but if someone starts a conversation based upon something they have experienced, you need to accept that as a fact and then refute the conclusions based upon it, not refute the fact that their experiences occurred. This is a mistake that I used to make and if you go down the road of refuting the anecdotal evidence, you always close the other person's mind to any form of argument.

This is of course if your goal is to change my mind, which is probably not the case, and you're just expressing yourself selfishly as usual, Putin.

"You cannot, (you think you can, but that doesn't matter) refute someone's life experiences through studies."

Yes, in fact, you can. Individual perceptions never tell the whole picture of a problem. They cannot be trusted. You may not find it convincing, but that's rather irrelevant. If truth matters to you, then studies will carry more weight than whatever your personal impressions are of a subject. If all that matters is accepting claims that cause you minimum stress and self-criticism, then they won't. Indeed, refusal to consult studies on a topic and reflexively reverting to personal experience as trumping all indicates a tremendous amount of arrogance. How can your experience speak for everybody else as the final arbiter of truth? Why have you no interest in whether your experience matches up with others?

"You can publish an infinite amount of studies on equality between races, but you can't refute the fact that a person's house was robbed by black people 5 times out of 5. "

And this right here is the danger of relying on personal experience, because it justifies ignorance and collective guilt being placed on races of people. Indeed, this is the source of racial hatreds from time immemorial, incomplete impressions based on personal experience.

And yes I can refute the "fact" that not all black people are criminals. Your personal impression that all black people are criminals is not the final word on the subject. The sum total of crime and the racial breakdown of who commits it, does in fact reflect reality better than your personal bias.

"I'm saying this for your benefit, and I hope you'll listen. It is a tough lesson but if someone starts a conversation based upon something they have experienced, you need to accept that as a fact and then refute the conclusions based upon it, not refute the fact that their experiences occurred"

No, actually, I don't. Because people lie. And even if they're not lying they don't always get an accurate picture of what is going on.

"This is a mistake that I used to make and if you go down the road of refuting the anecdotal evidence, you always close the other person's mind to any form of argument."

Why is it my fault that a person is unwilling to consider any information other than what they personally perceive?

"This is of course if your goal is to change my mind, which is probably not the case, and you're just expressing yourself selfishly as usual"

You claim that your personal experience trumps all data and I'm the one expressing myself selfishly? It's as if words have no meaning.

This is going off on an interesting tangent, so I’ll continue.

If your response to an anecdote is “studies say otherwise: you are lying” then that’s the biggest evidence of self-righteousness I can think of. People’s stories are unreliable, but if you want to win the argument you need to approach them as if they are always right. Because when you argue with someone, you need to enter their reality to change their mind. Bricking yourself off from their reality means that nobody will change their mind; it’s just empty contradiction.

For example if a person told me he was beaten by the police for no reason, I probably wouldn’t believe him. I could just say “you’re lying” but he will just think I am part of the conspiracy against him. And so to change his mind about the police relevant studies showing that Britain has almost no people beaten by police is futile. It’s much more effective to give an example of times when you’ve been extraordinarily helped by the police, and so the person will probably adopt a more middle ground.

First thing you need to consider:
If the opponent’s anecdote is unlikely, does that make it untrue? No, if you are in a room with someone who flips a coin on heads 10 times, no one will believe you either because of the low probability. But such things can and do happen.

By adopting an automatic “anecdote is false” mode you essentially say 10 heads in a row can never happen. It’s illogical logic.

It’s better to say: **If** the opponent’s anecdote is true, can I refute the conclusions that it has created?

So, if I have experienced atheists who are uncharitable, you should argue by saying that you know many charitable atheists, and selfish religious people (which I can perfectly believe) and thus the argument will develop.
“Why is it my fault” just sounds childish. People are going to disagree with you throughout life, and it is only your unwillingness to accept another’s reality that makes this a problem.

"First thing you need to consider:
If the opponent’s anecdote is unlikely, does that make it untrue? No, if you are in a room with someone who flips a coin on heads 10 times, no one will believe you either because of the low probability. But such things can and do happen.

By adopting an automatic “anecdote is false” mode you essentially say 10 heads in a row can never happen. It’s illogical logic."

Sure such things can and do happen. But the point is you are the one who is ruling out other people's experiences without even investigating. You're saying that it doesn't matter what the data of people's experiences are, only your experience counts. You're ruling out the possibility that some black people might not be criminals, because that's not your own experience. It's not the data that is 'self-righteous', it's the person who puts their own perception above everybody else's.

You're in fact projecting your own unwillingness to hear anything that contradicts your own view onto me. You're only defense of this is what to subject you to data hurts your feelings and shuts you off from listening to me. Fine, so be it. But don't pretend it's anything other than a reflection of your own close-mindedness, not mine. I'm telling you that other people have experienced different things than you, in data form. You don't care. You want to hear about my own anecdotes, and then we can get into a he said, he said debate, and everybody can go on their merry way with way to judge the truth claims.

"People are going to disagree with you throughout life, and it is only your unwillingness to accept another’s reality that makes this a problem."

See above. It's not me who is unwilling to accept another's reality. You're ruling out all perceptions of reality except your own. Sorry I'm not going to say that's justified just because it'll make people feel better about themselves.

I'm not ruling out your reality at all Putin. I'm ruling out a copy and pasted link.

Please tell me what you think and I will happily listen.

Hey Synapse,

Let's not issue collectivist/essentialist pronouncements about the moral character of atheists, okay. :-)

Three (four days?) in. That's awesome, I haven't ever done as hard a fast as the one you're attempting. You've got people around you that are familiar with the process? It's helpful, like with anything new, to have someone to talk it over with.

"Perhaps atheists need to be more religious and more spiritual..."

You do realize that we'd stop being atheists if we became religious. As for spiritual... bah. Every atheist probably has his own opinion on that matter.