Why is polygamy illegal?
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
The theists don't see the absurdity in insisting on a proof; if there's one chance in Graham's number that god exists, then he must, obviously.
Theists are not just theists, you know. No one believes in just the existence of something called God. They start to define this thing, and not just vaguely! An Abrahamic God is too specific. You should ask for definitions, what is the universe and what God they want to defend the honor of. Then all it takes is a flaw.
On the other hand, if the God is too useless (like God of the gaps) non-intervening coward with no miracles and such, let them believe in it there is no harm in their delusional fantasies.
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@dse The problem is that their definition will wriggle and . Point out any factual errors and they were just speaking figuratively.
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
He doesn't. He's merely looking for an opportunity to run Standard Line #3, which goes like this: You can't prove your axioms, any more than I can prove mine. Therefore, your atheism rests on faith every bit as much as my theism does. Therefore, atheism is a religion. Therefore, nyah, nyah, nyah. QED.
Regardless of whether or not it's a religion, the behaviors I've seen exhibited by some of its adherents and the fervor with which they engage in such behaviors are characteristic of followers of a religion.
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@dse The problem is that their definition will wriggle and . Point out any factual errors and they were just speaking figuratively.
Light a candle in the dark (or just and enjoy). No one changes sides based on an Internet argument, or else there was no TDWTF.
No worries, religion is being averaged out as we speak, that is all that matters for us engineers, Q.E.D.
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@dse said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
No one changes sides based on an Internet argument,
I've definitely been swayed by arguments I've read or participated in online. It's not always instantaneous (changing opinions takes thoughtful reflection), and I've not always actively engaged in the argument. I can honestly say that I've changed opinions on several topics based primarily on the debates I've read and engaged in here.
Filed under: Excessively redundant redundancy in this post is a case of I'm about to pass out.
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@dse said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
On the other hand, if the God is too useless (like God of the gaps) non-intervening coward with no miracles and such, let them believe in it there is no harm in their delusional fantasies.
And here's a prime example of the smug, dismissive attitude I was talking about that I don't see as being all that different from the attitude exhibited by believers. ("Oh, you don't want to go to church? That's fine, you'll just burn in Hell for all eternity.")
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@Groaner said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Oh, you don't want to go to church? That's fine, you'll just burn in Hell for all eternity.
Does it follow with:
- Now as a punishment we ex-communicate you, but is just for your own good because Jesus loves you and does not want you to go to hell.
- Now we chop your head off, Kafir
If you hear about human rights violations, wife beating, honor killing, child abuse, chopped heads, ... what is the most likely common denominator that comes into your mind? Do you think a rational non-delusional human being, will commit any of those and believe he will be rewarded beyond belief in the afterlife?
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@dse said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@Groaner said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Oh, you don't want to go to church? That's fine, you'll just burn in Hell for all eternity.
Does it follow with:
- Now as a punishment we ex-communicate you, but is just for your own good because Jesus loves you and does not want you to go to hell.
- Now we chop your head off, Kafir
If you hear about human rights violations, wife beating, honor killing, child abuse, chopped heads, ... what is the most likely common denominator that comes into your mind? Do you think a rational non-delusional human being, will commit any of those and believe he will be rewarded beyond belief in the afterlife?
That's cool, except I wasn't talking about radical Islam or other religious extremism. I was talking about how you seem to perceive non-interventionist deists as having "delusional fantasies."
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@antiquarian said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
OK, so how do you intend to prove that?
If it's an axiom, you can't prove it. All you can do is show that it is consistent (or not) with the other axioms under consideration (e.g., that there's an objective world at all), which in the case of that particular axiom is likely to be fairly easy. A badly chosen axiom would be something that lets you prove obviously crazy stuff, such as “2 + 2 = 5”.
The complication with religious axioms is that there are some good ones you might choose, and some bad ones. A good one is “there is an all-seeing, all-knowing god that loves you and wants you to behave like a moral adult”, whereas a bad one is “every word written in the holy book is absolute literal truth with a single obvious correct way to understand it”. I fear that many religious people use the latter type of axiom, and they're the weird crazies from the perspective of many others. They're acting the way they do because they think that it's the right thing to do, but the foundation for that concept is extremely shaky (or at least that's my belief).
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@dse said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Tell me how you define your universe, I can prove with high probability that no useful God exists.
Oh sure. Just pull science's holy grail, the Theory of Everything, out of a sack and hand it over to you like that.
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@dkf said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
If it's an axiom, you can't prove it.
You're right, my bad.
@dkf said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
The complication with religious axioms is that there are some good ones you might choose, and some bad ones.
This is a complication with axioms in general. That there's an objective world at all is good enough as far as it goes (but see below). "There's no such thing as ghosts" I'm not so sure about as an axiom. Denying it doesn't cause the same type of self-contradiction that denying the existence of an objective world would.
@dkf said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
that there's an objective world at all
What counts as an objective world? If the Matrix movies were true, that would still be an objective world, but would allow for intervention that seemed to violate all known laws of physics. Not saying the Matrix is real, just saying that the matter is nowhere near as simple as some people here are making it out to be. And I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the argument.
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@antiquarian said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
What counts as an objective world?
It's that thing that stubbornly doesn't go away even when you're not keen on believing in it. :) I don't actually know that it is real, but I believe it is and I'll have its reality as an axiomatic statement because there's really nothing I can do about it otherwise. After all, if there was no objective world, there'd be no point in discussing whether it is real with any of you, as it and you all would be figments of my imagination so far as I could tell…
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@dkf All that is why I agreed that "there is an objective world" is a good axiom to have, but you seem to have misread my question. Would the Matrix count as an objective world if it existed? Sure, it went away in the movie when Neo stopped believing in it, but most of the population would have no reason not to believe it, and Occam's razor would give interesting results in that hypothetical case.
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@antiquarian The Matrix scenario is just a modernized version of Descartes' Evil Demon thought experiment.
(Beautiful OneBox, five stars)
In trying to reason his way out of it, Descartes uses his
which seems so flawed to me that I'm not sure how it was taken seriously for so long.
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@error the ontological argument is really using God as an axiom and doing some circular reasoning from there to try and hide the fact you're defining it as an axiom. You could use a slight modification to prove that Platonic Forms exist in reality
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@error Descartes didn't exist. He said it himself AFAIK
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@Jaloopa said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@error the ontological argument is really using God as an axiom and doing some circular reasoning from there to try and hide the fact you're defining it as an axiom.
Filed under: What the...? Why does this OneBox work?
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
The Matrix scenario is just a modernized version of Descartes' Evil Demon thought experiment.
What's interesting about that is that even in the Evil Demon thought experiment (by the way, the scenario goes back a lot farther than Descartes) there is an objective world, consisting (at least) of Descartes and the evil demon. The Plato Cult has a chapter about this.
@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
which seems so flawed to me that I'm not sure how it was taken seriously for so long.
Part of the problem is that philosophers are people and not computers. Objectivity is hard, let's go shopping!
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@candlejack1 Descartes walks into a bar. The barman asks "the usual?"
"I think not", says Descartes, and vanishes.
At this point, the barman knows it wasn't the real Descartes, because such a great logician would know that
a=>b
!=!a=>!b
, and this guy was just trying to get free drinks on Descartes' tab.
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@candlejack1 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@error Descartes didn't exist. He said it himself AFAIK
Yeah, like I'd believe a guy who doesn't exist.
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@Jaloopa said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@candlejack1 Descartes walks into a bar. The barman asks "the usual?"
"I think not", says Descartes, and vanishes.
At this point, the barman knows it wasn't the real Descartes, because such a great logician would know that a=>b != !a=>!b, and this guy was just trying to get free drinks on Descartes' tab.
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
It seems like we're arguing over where the burden of proof belongs.
Only idiots argue over that, hence why atheists ask for proof of theists assertions. An atheist cannot prove a negative in this regard, so all the burden of proof lies on the believer.
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@Groaner said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
the behaviors I've seen exhibited by some of its adherents and the fervor with which they engage in such behaviors are characteristic of followers of a religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xVBldyy_Oo
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JSUZtJECRI
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@dkf said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
A badly chosen axiom would be something that lets you prove obviously crazy stuff, such as “2 + 2 = 5”.
Even under standard arithmetic definitions, two plus two does equal five, for larger values of two*. Which is, of course, why using floating-point arithmetic for financial calculations requires such extreme care as to be generally best avoided.
*anything >= 2.25 and < 2.5 will do
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
why using floating-point arithmetic for financial calculations requires such extreme care as to be generally best avoided.
An old favorite of mine:
Filed under: Precise, but not accurate.
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@antiquarian said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
This is a complication with axioms in general. That there's an objective world at all is good enough as far as it goes
The existence of an objective world is, strictly speaking, not at all self-evident.
Really, the only self-evident fact is the existence of subjective experience. Any claim about that experience - including the apparently basic claim that it may have objective properties, i.e. features that would be agreed on by multiple fair observers - rests on assorted kinds of assumption.
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
He's wearing one blue and one red sock!
Filed under: Better than eating stuff off his foot, I suppose.
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
He's wearing one blue and one red sock!
That has always been his thing. He never wears matching socks. I guess he doesn't believe in it.
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@Polygeekery The observation that finding matching socks in the wash basket is a sheer waste of time is not the same as a belief that socks must never be matched.
That said, it's not immediately obvious from Dawkins on socks which side of that line he comes down on.
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Dawkins on socks
Wat.
Filed under: I only buy one kind of sock. Every sock matches every other sock.
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@antiquarian said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
This is a complication with axioms in general. That there's an objective world at all is good enough as far as it goes
The existence of an objective world is, strictly speaking, not at all self-evident.
Really, the only self-evident fact is the existence of subjective experience. Any claim about that experience - including the apparently basic claim that it may have objective properties, i.e. features that would be agreed on by multiple fair observers - rests on assorted kinds of assumption.
This is the point of Descartes's argument. He starts off by doubting everything. But he cannot get past the fact that something exists which is doubting. A Doubter, if you will. And this Doubter has some concept of "myself". And it also has some ideas about things besides itself, which it terms, "others". And the argument continues from there to rebuild all of reality.
An extreme and completely solipsistic argument would contend that only "my" consciousness (with all of its memories of the past) has existed only from the time I last awoke until the present moment.
Practically, though, we have to assume that an external reality exists on a fundamental level. Along with that, we also make assumptions that seem to fit the world as we experience it, and (at least ought to, practicably) modify those assumptions as we find better ones.
BTW, I am a staunch theist of the literal-Bible Christian variety, and I enjoy debates along these lines. I would really like to find someone who has an opposing viewpoint to give a point-by-point critique of C.S. Lewis's Miracles. He gives some of the best logical arguments I have ever encountered for theism, and along the way provides responses for the most common counter-arguments.
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@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
I am a staunch theist of the literal-Bible Christian variety, and I enjoy debates along these lines
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
if there's one chance in Graham's number that god exists, then he must, obviously.
TIL G64 === 100
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@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
this Doubter has some concept of "myself". And it also has some ideas about things besides itself, which it terms, "others". And the argument continues from there to rebuild all of reality.
For me, the most interesting parts of that sequence are the ones that get completely glossed over: the nature of "things" as separable units of reasoning. When we bundle some particular subset of undifferentiated existence and call it a "thing", we're actually doing something rather more complicated than it appears to be. I'm quite interested in the way we draw conceptual boundaries around things, which is why I raised the "same flame" question earlier in this thread.
Thingifying existence is useful in that it enables us to reason about things and their relationships in ways that have explanatory and therefore predictive power, but it's by no means the only useful mode of experiencing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU#t=18s&end=18m43s
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@ben_lubar said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
if there's one chance in Graham's number that god exists, then he must, obviously.
TIL G64 === 100
I thought of the dumb quote a few minutes later. I knew it wasn't equivalent but it was an equally stupid conclusion.
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@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Practically, though, we have to assume that an external reality exists on a fundamental level.
Technically not, and a lot of attention has been put into this very topic by philosophers over thousands of years. However, it's a good candidate for an axiom as without it you don't really get anywhere at all; everything just runs into the imaginary sand very rapidly. In particular, there's no debate if there's no other-than-self to debate with, which requires there to be more than the self, which requires some sort of objective world (which can be an illusion, so long as it is an illusion we can't pierce).
All of which was my point.
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@error It is a long running joke where you do it on purpose. One of the old school English TV chat show hosts like Frost or Parkinson used to deliberately where mismatched or socks that didn't match the rest of the attire.
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@dkf said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
In particular, there's no debate if there's no other-than-self to debate with
Dubious. I argue with myself all the time.
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@flabdablet by yourself, you mean @boomzilla, of whom you are an alt, yes?
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@Jaloopa As another of my alts, you already know the answer to that.
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@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
An extreme and completely solipsistic argument would contend that only "my" consciousness (with all of its memories of the past) has existed only from the time I last awoke until the present moment.
I'm a solipsist and, I have to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us.
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@djls45 At the same time though, people have taken that to more of an extreme point than you seem to have read: they go all the way past 'i think therefore I am' and reach 'thought exists', because defining 'I' is difficult.
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@Magus I think I think, therefore I possibly are
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@Magus said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
all the way past 'i think therefore I am' and reach 'thought exists', because defining 'I' is difficult
Defining 'thought' is difficult as well.
"This is" almost works but runs into trouble once inquiry begins into the nature of "is".
"this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-this-..." is hard to argue against.
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@Magus said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@djls45 At the same time though, people have taken that to more of an extreme point than you seem to have read: they go all the way past 'i think therefore I am' and reach 'thought exists', because defining 'I' is difficult.
Thought exists because something is thinking.
One of the thoughts which that something thinks about is a concept of 'self', specifically 'myself'.@Jaloopa said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@Magus I think I think, therefore I possibly are
But I might not be (i.e. I might not exist).
But 'I' am thinking about thinking, so something must exist that can think.
Further, that something must be able to think about thinking.
And again, that 'thinker' has some concept of 'me', which it relates to as an identity.
Thus, a thinker that calls itself 'me' must exist.
In other words, I do think, therefore I must exist.
Or more succinctly, I think, therefore I am.
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@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Or more succinctly, I think, therefore I am
that's what you think
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@Jaloopa said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
@djls45 said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
Or more succinctly, I think, therefore I am
that's what you think
Unless logic is broken.
So the ultimate, basic, foundational assumption must be 'Logic works'.
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@Magus said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
defining 'I' is difficult.
Discrete entities in general are difficult to define (which we touched on earlier about persons being arbitrary constructs). We conceptualize things as objects, concepts, systems, etc. These are convenient "shorthand" to describe macroscopic phenomena. The more precisely we try to describe them, however, the more elusive they become.
Consider the Ship of Theseus problem:
Imagine OneBox worked properly and a concise but descriptive summary appeared here.
OK, so things are not the things they're composed of. What are they? Patterns. What kind of patterns compose a thing? When does a thing stop being a thing? Is or is not a thing part of another thing?
Metaphysics is hard, let's go shopping.
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@flabdablet said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
finding matching socks in the wash basket
I solved that problem. They're all the same.
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@error said in Why is polygamy illegal?:
OK, so things are not the things they're composed of. What are they? Patterns. What kind of patterns compose a thing? When does a thing stop being a thing? Is or is not a thing part of another thing?
This touches on the heap problem too. One of something isn't a heap, a few hundred is. Where's the dividing line?