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Language is not static, it evolves just as our mind and thoughts do. Belief is a word that bends toward the meaning implied in context. It is the same as faith and that also has several shades of meaning. This is why poetry is the soul of language, it implies and we infer. Dictionary alone will be a limiting factor in understanding poetry and spirituality and the language of spirituality.
Religion and spirituality and god all have meaning that is grounded in context and sensibility.
Atheists such as you would like to pin these terms down to one thing so it they conveniently fit the way you think - no god, because no evidence. End of story.
The problem for you is it is not the end of story. It is infinite.
No language is not static, but words have understood meanings and if we are using different definitions from what a word is commonly understood to mean, we end up just talking past each other. You cannot go so far in arguing the fluidity of meaning that you just get to define it to suit your thinking or argument on any give day, either.
Also this evolution you speak of takes place in shared reality with others and not completely in between your ears or within a particular school of thought. Definitions are informally negotiated agreements, effectively.
Ironically my former evangelical tribe used to make this "religion vs relationship" argument (though for a somewhat different purpose) but at least they were not claiming that relationship and belief are the same thing or related in meaning. What they were on about was that religion can be a dead and lifeless thing but what one wants is a living and vital relationship with god. And the setting of that ideal / expectation explains a lot about why this "relationship" seemed so spectacularly one-sided to me.
agree with:
It applies equally to all.
cannot be expressed in words alone
It can only be implied and inferred
These are why we need to have a process to evaluate a claim/belief IMO:
It can only be implied and inferred
it cannot be explained it is this or that.
t is only inferred and those who infer need no other evidence
here are many things we infer and accept without evidence.
there is over lap.
I shy away from using "we don't have anything to compare it to" in forming a beliefs. I think we form more healthy beliefs when we compare what we don't know to something we do know. Basically a measurement.
I think comparing what we belief to what we have in hand is more reliable. Some atheist and theist have to avoid using what we know to evaluate what we do not know for obvious reasons. Their belief starts looking less reliable.
Example "love" ...
I can people give drugs and change their "love". What does that tell us about it?
I observe that some love is one of the most selfish thing I ever saw. What does that tell us about love?
What does that say about Love being separate, causeless, and why.
Science cannot measure consciousnesses. It accepts it as a hard problem. We can accept and live with hard problems and uncertainties. Do it all the time.
Science cannot measure consciousnesses. It accepts it as a hard problem. We can accept and live with hard problems and uncertainties. Do it all the time.
I do not mean to be pedantic, but it is philosophy rather than science that describes the "hard problem of consciousness". That it calls it that rather than "the inherently insoluble problem of consciousness" suggests that progress might be made in the future. But you are correct -- in the meantime, we CAN accept and live with unknowns and uncertainties. They are not intolerable things that must be papered over with baseless assertions and wild guesses. They can be provisionally accepted as placeholders unless and until we actually learn enough to answer those questions.
Science cannot measure consciousnesses. It accepts it as a hard problem. We can accept and live with hard problems and uncertainties. Do it all the time.
That is not jist of what I what I said. To start, we can't directly measure but we can measure indirectly. Its like judging wind speed from inside a house and looking out the window.
You start at
Science cannot measure consciousnesses
It accepts it as a hard problem.
We can accept and live with hard problems and uncertainties.
Do it all the time.
and those are true.
Now for the application. How do we teach people what we mean ... especially children IMO.
Your way:
Using nothing as a reference point: consciousness is [this/that].
my way:
Using your above statements ... And using what we do know ...
In certain volumes of space/time we can change/stop consciousness in a few ways so it may be [this/that] ...
I do not mean to be pedantic, but it is philosophy rather than science that describes the "hard problem of consciousness". That it calls it that rather than "the inherently insoluble problem of consciousness" suggests that progress might be made in the future. But you are correct -- in the meantime, we CAN accept and live with unknowns and uncertainties. They are not intolerable things that must be papered over with baseless assertions and wild guesses. They can be provisionally accepted as placeholders unless and until we actually learn enough to answer those questions.
Now we apply this to our statement of belief about god
Atheism is also strong enough to accept beliefs that are linked to observation.
Atheism is strong enough to accept beliefs that offer mechanisms, explanations, and make predictions.
Atheism is strong enough to list beliefs in a relative reliability order and openly discuss them and why we weight what we are saying as we do.
For example: in a belief forum where we are asked to provide the reasons ...
"for practical consideration religion is so dangerous ..."
"science clearly points to humans as a part of a larger more complex system"
Language is not static, it evolves just as our mind and thoughts do. Belief is a word that bends toward the meaning implied in context. It is the same as faith and that also has several shades of meaning. This is why poetry is the soul of language, it implies and we infer. Dictionary alone will be a limiting factor in understanding poetry and spirituality and the language of spirituality.
Religion and spirituality and god all have meaning that is grounded in context and sensibility.
Atheists such as you would like to pin these terms down to one thing so it they conveniently fit the way you think - no god, because no evidence. End of story.
No, atheists want the meaning of words to remain grounded in context and sensibility to stop theists playing word games. Your black and white definition of religion as an organization is an example, that is not the only definition of religion.
Atheists do not need to skew evidence. The religious do.
Science cannot measure consciousnesses. It accepts it as a hard problem. We can accept and live with hard problems and uncertainties. Do it all the time.
See, now you are redefining the hard problem of consciousness.
I do not mean to be pedantic, but it is philosophy rather than science that describes the "hard problem of consciousness". That it calls it that rather than "the inherently insoluble problem of consciousness" suggests that progress might be made in the future. But you are correct -- in the meantime, we CAN accept and live with unknowns and uncertainties. They are not intolerable things that must be papered over with baseless assertions and wild guesses. They can be provisionally accepted as placeholders unless and until we actually learn enough to answer those questions.
No, the hard problem of consciousness is a scientific question. It is the philosophers who use it as a god of the gaps argument to argue for a cosmic consciousness.
Naturally that makes this the wrong forum to discuss it in detail.
Language is not static, it evolves just as our mind and thoughts do. Belief is a word that bends toward the meaning implied in context. It is the same as faith and that also has several shades of meaning. This is why poetry is the soul of language, it implies and we infer. Dictionary alone will be a limiting factor in understanding poetry and spirituality and the language of spirituality.
Religion and spirituality and god all have meaning that is grounded in context and sensibility.
Atheists such as you would like to pin these terms down to one thing so it they conveniently fit the way you think - no god, because no evidence. End of story.
The problem for you is it is not the end of story. It is infinite.
Ahhhhhhhhhh....you may have missed that a poster that you virtually always agree with gets constantly stuck on strict definitions on an almost daily basis.
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