HuskersNow

It's nice to hear that he's doing well, but with Gilmore coaching him, I don't expect him to make that big of an impact.

Yes I am. Words can have more than one definition. Some people give a very specific definition to the word "faith," while others give it a very broad definition that can include evidence. By substituting "faith" for "belief," I am not trying to change the meaning of what I wrote, but I am trying to make sure that someone doesn't misinterpret what I wrote. Some events could transpire that would put your testimony in doubt, decreasing the likelihood that your testimony is accurate. While other events (like whether you're known as a honest person) could add clout to your testimony, increasing the likelihood that your testimony is accurate. Practically, most people use probability in their everyday lives. If they didn't, then they wouldn't know what to do ever and couldn't live normally. The difference between your testimony and the testimony in the example you gave me is that we know that someone died in the latter, but we don't know if you're just making up the former. If you can never show that an idea is true or not, then why would you believe in that idea? If the evidence that you propose is really genuine, then that should increase the probability that God is real. Since we can't possibly determine if what you experienced actually happened simply based on your testimony, then we can't use it to increase the probability that God exists. I think that events can be interpreted incorrectly. Someone can see the effects of gravity and say that what's happening is that God is willing an object to fall to the ground. While someone else can see the same event and interpret it using the theory of gravity. One of those explanations is far more probable. I would really like to know what your religious experience was like. Could you give me a rundown on what happened?

I was just wondering what people think about our wide receiver blocking and how much it will help our running game. We have some pretty big wide receivers starting for us this year and I'm curious as to how effective they will be. I personally don't think that most corners can match up with us physically and that it's going to be a good year for our running backs.

I think we may be using different definitions of the word, "faith." Some define it as not being based on evidence. But, that is basically how I defined it in my case. By substituting belief for faith above, I think my position can be interpreted by others better. No, I know that you think you possess "evidence" through personal experience that God exists, but that is not really evidence at all. For one thing, I could make any claim and state that it is true because of some personal experience and no one could disprove my claim. I can't prove that your assertions are necessarily invalid, but I can assign probabilities to certain propositions. I don't think that your personal experiences that prove to you that God is real are valid because no one can disprove your claim. It fails the falsifiability test. On human perception: you (paraphrasing) say that since our experiences are necessarily subjective, that conclusions made using our senses aren't necessarily true. When a group see a movie in a movie theater, it is possible that they could all have just imagined everything that they think they saw on the screen and that every individual there imagined the exact same thing, but is that really likely? Isn't it much more likely that they actually saw a movie on the screen?

Anecdotal evidence has never proven anything. Faith in science? I have faith, founded on evidence, that science can provide explanations for natural phenomena. That is a far cry from the faith that you adhere to. I once thought like you when I was a Christian. I thought that the truths of my religion were self-evident. But critical reasoning has taught me that this is not the case. I have seen so-called "evidence" that your God is real, but none of it has ever stood up to scrutiny. What you're doing now is trying to convince us that our beliefs our founded on absolutely nothing but blind faith and nothing could be further from the truth.

Do you know how you can tell that an object is approximately a certain amount of years old without actually being there when it was created? Something called exponential decay allows scientists to, through the use of logarithms, determine the approximate age of an object. Because the halflife is known, this process works well. I don't have proof that the theory of gravity is true. So far, though, every object with mass that has been tested on this has been demonstrated to have gravity.

In response to jliehr: I don't think that carbon-14 dating is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it should be scrapped. Also, there are more ways to date objects than just the radiocarbon method. I noticed that one method you didn't mention is called rubidium-strontium dating. The interesting thing about this method is that it uses halflifes of 49 billion years, which is significantly longer than the carbon-14 halflife and is thus used to date objects billions of years old.

I have a question for you, jliehr, how old do you think the universe is? Due to the fact that you questioned the validity of carbon-14 dating would lead me to believe that you think it is less than 60,000 years old. Am I correct on that account?

I'm of the opinion that this conversation can't continue in any meaningful sense unless we agree on how to define harm in a quantifiable way, so any suggestions?

I don't assume. I haven't seen any evidence that can stand up to any scrutiny. What claims? I was writing about how some philosophers and scientists insist that there is no evidence for the existence of God. You're putting words in my mouth. Science is not a collection of flawed reasoning. Some theories around today will stand the test of time and some won't. That's the nature of the beast. I don't rely on faith that science is right, I look at evidence. Science does not rely on faith as you claim, but evidence. New evidence can come to light that puts current theories to doubt, unlike religion where ideas can never be doubted otherwise you could get ostracized. The fact that carbon dating methods are only decades old has nothing to do with their validity. The amount of Carbon-14 in a material is a large factor in determining the age of said material. Because their accounts are contradictory. Matthew and Luke give two different genealogies of Jesus in their books. You're exactly right, religion can't prove what happens after we die. Where did the concept of good and bad originate from? I don't know, but I'm guessing that it is thousands of years old. I think people decide for themselves what is good and bad, but that there is no objective good and bad in the universe. So you don't understand why God exists but you believe blindly that he does? Once again you are putting words in my mouth. When did I say that I am okay with convicting people based on evidence and testimony? Regardless if I do or do not believe that, you assume a great deal about what I haven't even written about on this board. Maybe I should just start making assumptions about you and then attacking your beliefs that I have no idea if you do believe or not. I don't believe in God because there is no reason to. If there is a good reason to, then I will. Regarding the testimony of the people who supposedly witnessed Christ's life, how do you know that any of that is true? Do you believe the testimony from Mohamed's followers that he did all sorts of fantastical things through Allah? What evidence am I claiming? I am saying that there is no evidence for God, thus I don't believe in him. It's really that simple. I'm assuming that you don't believe in intangible, invisible unicorns that live in our houses because there is no evidence for them. It does effect how I greet people and vote. It makes me less likely to harm others. I'm not pretending that I don't believe in God. I don't believe in him. I choose to reject unfalsifiable ideas. My rejection of unfalsifiable ideas is not a belief in something.

Fixed it for you. It depends on how you define harm. If I define it by saying it is the murder rate then the experiment can go on. How do you define harm?

You misinterpreted what the dictionary said.

You know what I meant but you chose to ignore it. Very funny. If you can quantify the amount of harm being done then you could follow two groups of people over a long period of time with the difference between them being their religion or lack thereof. At the end of the experiment you would then find out which group caused the most harm. They are not, which is what I'm getting at.

Completely agree, which is why I provided a link to an outside, dispassionate authority which provides a definition of this word. If you choose not to believe this authority, you must show how they are incorrect. And no, stating "I disagree with their definition" isn't an appropriate response. No, the "authority" has to provide evidence that shows his positive claim about the definition of a word is the only true definition. The burden of proof lies with those that make positive claims. No evidence? What evidence do you want? What's wrong with the link I provided? That link proves nothing. Atheism does not make any positive claims regarding, "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs." You can't bunch together all atheists and say this is what they believe except to say that they don't believe in deities.

It is falsifiable as I showed earlier. Believing in the unprovable makes you a caveman? I have bad news for you, then... Reread my post. WHEN HE WAS ENGULFED IN IGNORANCE. In other words, when he was a caveman. Are we talking about belief systems or reality now? Because such an experiment is not based in reality. This is not impossible to accomplish. Experiments of this kind can exist. You have proven nothing more than that you believe in different things than different people. Your beliefs are founded in truth and the unfalsifiable, no more than and no less than the beliefs of those you call "ignorant." My ideas about religion are not unfalsifiable.

You can't prove to me that any given word has such and such meaning. In order to have meaningful conversations, we have to agree on the definition of any term that we happen to be using. It's ok if someone disagrees with our definition, but by agreeing on a definition we make conversation constructive instead of confusing. Words have held different meanings over times. That doesn't mean that the definition that I'm using is wrong, it's just different than other definitions. You say it is a commonly held definition, but I notice that you provide no evidence for this fact. If it's so common, then I should be able to find any atheist off the street and most would agree with you that atheism is a religion. But somehow I don't think that this is the case.

I just simply don't believe in unfalsifiable ideas. I believe that when I press down the "e" key that an "e" will appear on my screen. I can't objectively prove that it will happen, but the probability that it will is very close to one. There is no evidence that a God exists. If you give me evidence that shows that God is almost certainly real, then I will believe in him. Man put religion into the equation when he was engulfed in ignorance. We don't all have to act like caveman all the time. The harm originated because of ignorance which education can do away with. The very definition of an unfalsifiable statement. It's interesting that you dismiss the unfalsifiable claims of others as "insane ideas" yet hold on to your own. If unfalsifiable ideas are harmful, why do you indulge in them? If you can quantify the amount of harm in a closed system, then you can do controlled experiments where religion is present in one area and is not present in another and see what happens to the amount of harm in each. So does defining yourself by political party, or by culture, or region, or any one of the myriad other ways you can define yourself. All have their benefits and drawbacks, all have the ability to be used for good and misused for evil. Religions rely on the ignorance of those that they proselytize to to swell their numbers. By educating people, you remove a reason that people accept the "truths" of religion. My claim still stands in this thread, that the net effects of religion are harmful.

No. A word does not have any objective meaning. People give words meaning. I define atheism as the absence of belief that any deities exist. There I didn't selectively believe things. Your example defined atheism differently than me which means their definition and mine are two different things. That is not selective belief. There is no evidence that atheism SHOULD be defined in a certain way. Consider this: I doubt that we have the same definition for every single word in the English language. That does not mean that we selectively believe certain things to be true. Many people define the word, "libertarian" in different ways but that does not mean that people selectively believe certain things to be true.

Any word can be defined however we want it to be defined. But I define it as not being a religion.

I assume that since there is absolutely no evidence for God that he doesn't exist. The idea of God is an unfalsifiable one, and I'm not going to waste my life believing in all sorts of insane ideas just because people threaten me with hell if I don't. The idea of God is a theory, but not a scientific one. A scientific idea requires the possibility that its claims can be tested. The theory of God fails miserably on that count. You're right when you say God can't be proven or disproven, that is an unfalsifiable idea. The "word of handed down books from dead scientists or philosophers" taught me how to think critically and remove the blinders that Christianity had placed over me. They taught me to examine my beliefs and reason out why I actually believe them. In my case, they didn't tell me to accept their beliefs based on faith. I would have been insulted and stopped reading if they had done so. They gave reasons for their positions and I either accepted or rejected them. I never once accepted their ideas blindly on faith. Christianity requires that leap of faith that no reasonable person would ever take. The books and personal accounts of Christianity require you to take that leap of faith. "Believe my claims that I have provided absolutely no evidence for and you will be saved!" is not something that I would fall for. Christianity is an ignorant religion because it replaces reason with blind faith. Go into the lunatic asylum and when you return tell me if faith proves anything. The first sentence is a logical fallacy. I'll provide another one for entertainment value: the polio vaccine was created by man, the polio vaccine is inherently good, thus man is inherently good. See how that works? Or using an idea instead: man created the concept of quality control, quality control is good, thus man is good. My world is not magic, you're the one who believes in fantastical things about God. My claim in this thread has always been if people are educated so as to take off the yolk of religion, then the amount of harm in the world would be lessened. I am no historian, but man probably invented religion to explain natural phenomena that they didn't understand like earthquakes. Regarding the bold, do you believe that God had a beginning? If not, how could he exist by your own logic? Regarding the big bang theory, modern physics breaks down when you get to the planck density. I personally think that the universe arose because of vacuum fluctuations. There is no reason to think that a god created the universe. Since I'm sure you want to know more about how some physicists tackle this problem, I'm going to give you this link. Atheism is not a religion, it is a lack of belief in something. Theism makes the positive claim, atheism the negative one. My belief system is based on evidence, yours is based on blind faith without evidence, a big difference. All theistic religions make a positive claim regarding God's existence. But religion doesn't just let people sleep at night, does it? It effects everything you do from how you greet people to how you decide to vote. So I see that you have read Pascal's wager. If you're wrong about not believing in the ancient Egyptian gods, and your heart is weighted down with evil deeds, then you will be condemned to oblivion for all eternity, but if you're right and your heart is not weighted down then you will join Osiris in the afterlife. If you don't believe in some religion that I just made up, then you will suffer in another place that I just made up for all of eternity and it will really suck. But if you do believe in this made up religion then you will go to a heaven that is pretty neat. The problem with his wager is that the probability of Christianity being right is the same as the above examples, so should I believe in them too? I assign the same probability to all of them because there is no evidence to support the ideas at all. Just because many people believe in Christianity does not make the ideas true.

Hmm..... Just because some atheists think that atheism is a religion does not make it so. Some people define common terms far differently than others. Atheism is a lack of belief in something, not a belief in something. Theists are making the positive claim, not atheists, by definition.

That was like a silent, but deadly, Rickroll.

Yes, we will all get through this together, now let's all hold hands and pray to the Husker Gods and ask for their forgiveness for a very terrible sin...missing a Husker game! Hmmmm I wonder if Demeter, the Goddess of corn, is one of those we would pray to? Seriously, though, I've been in the same boat as some of you. Working during game days sucks big time, but having access to a radio helps a lot.

I never claimed that all harm would go away with more education, but that it could be lessened considerably. By education, I am not talking about those so-called institutions of learning known as public high schools or the like, I am talking about taking away ignorance and belief in unfalsifiable ideas and substituting them with reasoned out ideas based on the evidence available. I was saying that by removing religion the person who would have been harmed will no longer be harmed because of religion. Your analogy doesn't have any place in reality. Religion is not equatable to a mine in a minefield. You assume that all of the mines are equally destructive, but religion is especially so. Really, religion is an effect of ignorance. It is one of the many substitutes of reason. By lessening the amount of ignorance in the world, the amount of harm is subsequently reduced because of the harm that ignorance in general causes. In the last sentence of the paragraph, are you asking me to describe to you the history of religion and how it came about?

Why on earth would you move a starting running back to another position? I mean he could have easily started for them this year.