" Did you really?"

Yes I did, really. I don't see what your quotes of mine do to indicate otherwise. The majority of Jews do not believe in god or are at least agnostic.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-While-Most-Americans-Believe-in-God-Only-36-pct-A-2003-10.pdf

"Putin do you say Huxley and Haekel were brilliant scientists. Did i read this correctly? "

Yes. Only someone committed to smearing them would think otherwise. You think Huxley's work on anatomy was poor just because you disagree with his position on evolution? How typically sectarian of you.

I see, "other rabbis" evidently means "Rabbis throughout Israel".

Putin are you talking about rabbis or a majority/minority of Jews. I am not clear and it seems as though you aren't either given this comment: ''
''I said rabbis you illiterate twit.'' And these ''The majority of Jews do not believe in god or are at least agnostic.'', ''Satmar is one of the prominent sects of Hasidics in the US (not to mention Hungary, which has a large Jewish population compared to the rest of east/central Europe). Kinda odd to claim I'm ignoring Hasidic opinion while you claim that the Satmars are irrelevant fringe people and ''And I guess "mipenei hata'einu" is only a Haredi belief, eh?''

And you forgot this bit, AGAIN:

''Putin the fact that in searching for an explanation for the unexplicable some Jews reach for some disconcerting conclusions surely should not surprise you. ''

re the racist Huxley and the fraud Haekel, more in the morning, it is getting late in London. To the others trying to talk to Putin don't let his sociopathic ramblings and insults put you off. Just imagine what a miserable little life he leads and put yourself in the shoes of one of his thesis examiners. In fact if his supervisor is reading this, I might recomend someone good to do the job!

Why do you insist on this last bit? The last bit is irrelevant since I'm not "surprised" by the lengths the religious will go to justify horrific events. The fact is Santa appeals to the self-evident wisdom of rabbis while continuing to regurgitate anti-communist red herrings at every opportunity. The irony is that when it comes to preserving Jewish culture, the very communists he condemns have done much more than too many venerated rabbis who lecture the victims of heinous crimes for their sinful ways and sit around waiting for god's deliverance from oppression.

Yeah something tells me I don't think they'll be taking instructions from a smear merchant who thinks all social science is a sham.

Yes the communists were great at preserving jewish culture, go on the street and ask russian Jews how true this statement is. I will not be liable for your injuries

this is how communist preserve Jewish Culture, in putin Friendly format

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets

Right, except the founders of the Israeli state were Marxists. The first state to recognize Israel was the USSR. The liberator of the camps and the destroyer of the Hitlerite hordes was the Red Army. The leader who ended the pogroms was Lenin. The only state to offer an autonomous province for Yiddish culture was the USSR. The leadership of the Hungarian, Czech and Polish communists during the important early post-war period were Jewish [Slansky, Rakosi, Bierut]. As was the top leader of the Yugoslav Army and Marxist theoretician [Pijade].

Notice how the very person who continually bitches about me using wikipedia all the time...uses wikipedia all the time.

"Right, except the founders of the Israeli state were Marxists. "

And.. My grandmother was one of them. Does that change the fact that Communists cracked down on Jewish culture in the soviet union? No. Does it damn communism, no. I only brought up communism because it suffers from the same exact flaws you attributed to religion.

"The liberator of the camps and the destroyer of the Hitlerite hordes was the Red Army."

Which were coincidently also the same army that tried to send my grandfather to siberia

"The only state to offer an autonomous province for Yiddish culture was the USSR."

And then launched a campaign of murder against Yiddush cultural leaders

"The leadership of the Hungarian, Czech and Polish communists during the important early post-war period were Jewish [Slansky, Rakosi, Bierut] As was the top leader of the Yugoslav Army and Marxist theoretician [Pijade]. "

Im sure they embraced their jewish heritage

Heres another thing for you to chew on, again in a format you can understand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors_Plot

"Im sure they embraced their jewish heritage"

Well we've already concluded that anybody who doesn't meet your particular standards of what it means to be Jewish doesn't count as a Jew for you, so you can summarily dismiss the unprecedented power and influence Jews had within communist countries, as you can summarily dismiss their achievements in preserving Jewish culture from annihilation while your capitalist buddies sat back and spectated with glee, and while your revered rabbis opposed the Zionist project every step of the way - both reform and orthodox.

And we can falsely equate the church's alliance with the slavers, the church's alliance with the serfowners, the church's alliance with the big landlords in Spain and France during the revolutionary upheavals, and the church's alliance with every reactionary movement ever - including fascism - with the movement that defeated fascism, redistributed wealth on an unprecedented scale, and emancipated women. The movement that fought for biracial trade unionism in the south when no one else would. The movement that was behind the civil rights marches when your capitalist buddies was backing apartheid. The movement that was behind the anti-colonial struggles when your capitalist buddies were mobilizing to use brutal force to suppress them. We can say it's a wash because it's easier than doing any real analysis.

False equivalence, the last refuge of the intellectually lazy and morally smug.

false equivalence, the cornerstone of your entire shtick.

Thanks semck. I'm a piss poor bible scholar, finding it an epically boring read, but it really seems that any time somebody finds fault with a passage, we're told we're 'taking it out of context.' I find it hard to believe that Jesus wasn't talking to the masses in ANY of those passages, but I'll cede the point: I'd have to check for context myself and am not willing to do so :P

However, with respect the rest of your statement regarding science and the like is pure hogwash, and this type of mindset is what I resent the most about religion. That the sun will rise tomorrow isn't an opinion, or a world-view: it is a fact. For support I offer you the previous 2+ million sunrises in recorded history, and the laws of physics which support and explain these happenings. Now, lets say tomorrow the sun DOESN'T rise!

OMG OMG the laws of physics, chemistry, and man come crumbling down! Err... wait, No they don't. We'll do research and observation until we've explained this anomaly, and in the end there will be a real world, physical explanation, just like there has been every other time a paradigm is challenged. We reconsider our thinking, and redefine the paradigm, which is basically what separates science and religion, in that you do NOT redefine your beliefs to match reality. And thus, as more and more unexplainables become explained, religion is harder and harder pressed for relevance.

In fact, your whole example is nothing more than spyman's previously stated "flying elephant" example, which he already explained a great deal more eloquently that I could. I'm not against religion, at its fundamental. It's the first example of science, an attempt to explain the mysterious. But when you (indefinite pronoun you) refuse to bend on even the most obvious, I lose respect for the institution.

Religion does have a purpose: it still attempts to answer the one big question. But it's time for religion to stick to that, and stop interfering with this world.

Yellowjacket,

Thank you for the response.

I'm not questioning that the immediate context looks like that. I'm referring to Christ's teaching taken as a whole, and pointing out that the apostles would have been privy to the whole (a great deal of which they passed on).

Anyway, on to the rest: your whole response assumes that there ARE laws of physics, that the universe behaves regularly AT ALL. My whole point is that you have no way to know that. It might be COMPLETELY chaotic, defying EVERY possible law, and it's just happened to be regular for awhile now, and it's going to stop tomorrow. Obviously, if this is the case, then if the sun fails to rise tomorrow, we will abjectly fail at every attempt to model the new behavior, because there won't be anything to model.

The idea that the universe will continue to be regular is a complete assumption, period. The past however many billion sunrises don't support it, unless you assume that the future will mirror the past, but you have no reason to believe this (what -- it has in the past? Why will it again? CF David Hume -- no theist, by the way -- on the problem of induction). You just ASSUME it. This all happens before you can even do a lick of science, so science can't be of any use in justifying your assumption. If the universe is lawless, there won't be a law to tell you why.

"OMG OMG the laws of physics, chemistry, and man come crumbling down! Err... wait, No they don't. We'll do research and observation until we've explained this anomaly, and in the end there will be a real world, physical explanation, just like there has been every other time a paradigm is challenged. "

Yes, I understand that you're assuming there are laws, and that the future will be like the past. My point is that you can't justify this assumption (and please don't cite the past in trying to do so. The similarity of the past and the future is what's at issue).

Of course, I'm not arguing that the sun won't rise tomorrow. I too know that it will. But unlike you, I can explain how I could know such a thing at all.

Regards.

semck:

By that logic you're implying that we can't prove anything, because it all might just change at the last minute, and therefore science and observation are... fruitless? Yet the models we've constructed work, and we are able to make accurate real world predictions of future behavior based on these models. What is science but observation, and the attempt to explain the observed? You can't just disregard a few millenia of scientific advancement just because "It might just blow up for no reason."

I am quite comfortable justifying this "assumption" as you call it, because observation dictates that the sun has risen every day, and the hard work of generations of very bright people have come up with some really damn good explanations for why this happens.

I'm not saying these laws are infallible... that's the mistake the religious make. Of course we would abjectly fail at modeling the behavior of the future if it is contrary to what the past and the paradigms we have in place dictate. However, as our data pool increases, and time passes, and bright minds get to work, we would be able to come up with a new model to explain this observable event.

I don't really understand your last point, either. I feel I've offered a pretty competent explanation for why it will. How do YOU know the sun will rise?

With respect, if I'm understanding you correctly, I really can't believe you are pursuing this line of thinking.

7 pages in 1 day. LOL!

As I said at the opening post:
http://xkcd.com/774/

I know, OP created the great chicago fire by rubbing a stick against the air.

"Yes, I understand that you're assuming there are laws, and that the future will be like the past. My point is that you can't justify this assumption "

If by "justify this assumption" you mean "prove to 100% certainty" - it is true you can't. Only tautologies are certain.
But if we define "justify the assumption" as "reasonable to assume" - we then yes we can justify the assumption. All knowledge is contingent on certain assumptions. If we are to have a meaningful discussion about why the world exists, and whether or not God is is part of that explanation, we must make certain assumptions: assumption number 1 is "the world exists". Both theism and atheism are equally dependent on these assumptions. Save the extreme skepticism for another debate.

Hi Yellowjacket, thanks again.

I'm not sure why you're surprised I'm pursuing this line of thinking. The problem of induction is one of the primary outstanding problems in philosophy. It's not like I'm pulling it out of my butt.

"By that logic you're implying that we can't prove anything, because it all might just change at the last minute, and therefore science and observation are... fruitless?"

Precisely. I could not have described the situation of your worldview better.

"Yet the models we've constructed work, and we are able to make accurate real world predictions of future behavior based on these models."

We have been able to, yes. In the past. The question is, will they keep working. None of the laws we've discovered actually explains itself, or implies (without bare assumption) that it will continue to operate into the future.

"I am quite comfortable justifying this "assumption" as you call it, because observation dictates that the sun has risen every day,"

Yes, but why does that matter? Let me explain. Here is your reasoning:

Premise 1: The sun has always risen, every day.

Conclusion: Therefore, it will rise tomorrow.

There is a missing presmise 2 here:

Premise 2: Tomorrow will be like all the past days, at least as respects natural law.

Now, the question is, why do you accept premise 2? You might try the following (in fact, you basically have):

Premise 3: In the past, future days have been like past days.

But in order to get Premise 2 from Premise 3, you would need Premise 4:

Premise 4: Tomorrow will be like the past, at least as respects the future being like the past.

Where do you get premise 4?

Et cetera. It turns out there is nowhere you can go to ever actually justify premise 2 apart from just assuming it. All the things you try to adduce as evidence for it ("the sun has risen billions of times....", scientific law, etc.) in fact only even act as evidence for it if you make another unjustified assumption.

So now we're left to ask -- on your worldview, is this assumption somehow a priori likely? The answer: no. We have no reason to expect the universe to be lawful instead of lawless, given that (say you) there is no god, or we don't know anything about him.

"and the hard work of generations of very bright people have come up with some really damn good explanations for why this happens."

Well, first of all, it doesn't have anything to do with how smart the person is. What matters is the argument. The philosophers have been smart too, not just the scientists.

Second, scientists have never explained WHY scientific law holds at all. They couldn't possibly. They can explain things in terms of law only, and if they came up with a law that said "there has to be a law," based on observation, well... what's to keep that law from being broken?

No, scientists only explain some laws in terms of further laws. For example, first there were laws about how matter behaves, then laws about how atoms make up matter and behave, then laws about how subatomic particles behave, and then smaller particles still, etc. Always, they are just developing new laws. But why couldn't some electron just decided to charge straight for another electron and hold on for dear life, some day? A homochargical electron, if you will? This would (of course) violate all kinds of scientific laws, but you couldn't really give a metaphysical reason why it couldn't happen: you don't know why the electrons are following any laws in the first place.

And the point is, maybe the universe is actually random, and it's just appeared to follow laws for awhile. The vast majority of possible universes, in some sense, fall into this category. For example, say you toss a coin a hundred billion times. Somewhere along the way in there you might get a few thousand heads in a row. You might even get lucky and get the first billion all heads. That doesn't mean you're going to get heads from then on. It could be all random from thenceforth.

"Of course we would abjectly fail at modeling the behavior of the future if it is contrary to what the past and the paradigms we have in place dictate. However, as our data pool increases, and time passes, and bright minds get to work, we would be able to come up with a new model to explain this observable event."

As I already pointed out, this is false if the new paradigm (and the real paradigm) just happened to be completely lawless. This would have nothing to do with the brightness of the minds, and everything to do with the lack of any law to model. Going back to the coin toss situation -- it's a well studied problem, and it turns out it is almost guaranteed to be completely impossible to write down any formula or algorithm to describe the outcome of the hundred billion coin tosses. This is not a failure of intelligence -- THERE IS NO sequence of letters you could write down that would correctly predict the outcome of the coin tosses.

If the universe is that random, then there would just be no point. Of course, quite possibly we would no longer exist anymore, but I digress.

(The technical subject I refer to above is Kolmogorov complexity: since there are 2^100000000000 possible strings of heads and tails, but only, say, ~2^100000 of them can be described by 100,000 characters or less (assuming 32 characters, for convenience), there's only at best a 1 in 2^1000000 chance of being able to describe a random one so. This gets worse as you go up).

"I feel I've offered a pretty competent explanation for why it will."

I fear you haven't even grasped the problem yet, much less offered an explanation.

Again, let me repeat: the past CANNOT POSSIBLY serve as evidence for induction.

Here's why. Suppose Joe drives a red car and Frank a blue one. One day, you come downstairs and your mother says, "Somebody came by for you and I thought you were out -- sorry." "Who was it?" you say. "Oh, it was Frank or Joe" (she says). "I can't remember -- they look so much alike."

Now, you noticed a blue car in the driveway. This thereby serves as some evidence that it was Frank.

Now rerun the story, but suppose Frank and Joe both drive blue cars -- in fact, identical blue cars. The fact that you saw a blue car in the driveway no longer serves as any evidence for one over the other.

OK, what does this have to do with anything? Well, the universe has been regular up till now, right? Imagine all the possible universes that are regular up till now: one of them goes right on being regular, others start behaving in weird, wild, fantastic ways. Some are totally random and unpredictable altogether (most -- see above).

The point is, if you are just trying to figure out which one will happen from now on, it is of no help to point to the past: they are all the same in the past. All regular. All identical. All the same as ours.

So the question is -- on what basis do you believe that the right one is the one that keeps on going, being regular?

As for my last point, it's not a very complicated one. If one believes in the God of the Bible, it's not hard to explain how we know that the universe will keep being regular, since God made it and told us it will go on being regular.

Regards.

@spyman,

Please explain why you think it is reasonable to assume. I don't mean you need to know it to 100% certainty. What I am suggesting is you can't know it beyond 0% certainty.

My whole point is that you can never have any justification for this assumption, AT ALL, in your worldview. None whatsoever, to any positive probability.

"All knowledge is contingent on certain assumptions."

But if the assumptions are completely arbitrary, such as yours that the universe will continue to be regular, then they might as well be anything else, too. You have no room to throw a stone at those who assume any random old thing.

Case and point, I am beyond argueing over a petty thing like religion

Note: one of those 100000's should read 100005, sorry. :-P

The term translated "The Jews" when used like that in many of the NT passages refers to the Jewish leadership, mostly the Sadducees who were in power in the Temple but at least somewhat to the Sanhedrin in general. After all, the author of this passage, Paul, was Jewish too. Sometimes truth requires a careful reading of the scripture in the context of the time, but always, truth requires the desire to find it.

That last was @Putin.

Putin, are you a truth-seeker, a defender of your own particular set of beliefs, or just an attacker of Christianity??

We are discussing atheism versus theism - how does this extreme skepticism support the theist over the atheist?

... that was to semck83

@ Mujus - Of course the existence of God is a possibility I've considered. I have to have considered the possibility of God's existence in order to decide that I don't believe it. That said, I don't think that open mindedness means I have to be open to the idea of God, and not any number of other supernatural things, like aliens or the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Or are you suggesting that open mindedness dictates that I be open to the possibility of just about anything that could conceivably exist?