A commenter at Uncommon Descent wrote
Keith, I am not convinced that you are an atheist. I believe that you are angry at God and suffer from cognitive dissonance. And to say that the evidence supports your materialist belief system is completely absurd!
I’ve seen versions of this “angry at God” accusation levelled at non-believers quite often and I wonder why those that use it think it makes sense.
The indomitable KeithS responds later in the same UD thread:
Okay, here’s some psychologizing for you guys:
You realize that atheists have good reasons for disbelieving in God and that they make good arguments to which you have no intelligent response. This makes you very anxious. In a vain attempt to lessen the anxiety, you try to convince yourselves that the atheist isn’t really an atheist, he’s just angry at God. That way you don’t have to take his arguments seriously. It’s much easier to write them off rather than acknowledge the painful truth: you cannot answer them, and your faith is irrational.
I’m not sure I agree with Keith on “…atheists have good reasons for disbelieving in God” and I would say myself that I have never had an inclination, need or desire to believe in “God” and thus never needed to convince myself that disbelief is a better option. I have never been a smoker. As a kid I tried to emulate others and puffed away but I couldn’t get past the point where addiction presumably kicks in. I have great respect for those who, having succumbed to addiction to nicotine, have been able later to kick the habit. Similarly, I can admire an ex-believer who has decided to quit. It must involve a great effort of will but at the same time I just can’t grasp the appeal of believing in the first place.
I’m sorry if the analogy regarding addiction is somewhat pejorative to people with religious convictions but I do find great difficulty in understanding the whole concept of “virtuoso believing“. I’m sure it involves emotion much more than reason. So while I’m puzzled that anyone could categorize an atheist as “angry at God” I can see why there is mutual incomprehension between believers and non-believers. Also being a non-smoker makes me less of a campaigner against smoking. As long as people don’t insist in blowing smoke in my face or that I should try this new/old brand of cigar, then I claim no right to stop other people from enjoying a quiet smoke.
I think there are one or two non-believers here. Is anyone angry at God?
Yeah, Allan! X>{
If you were only on the wrong side of this design stuff, that would be one thing. But from bendy spoons to aliens to Santa to Wikipedia to the Kennedy shooting to Atlantis—–you are on the wrong side of EVERY FREAKING ISSUE.
Wake up, man!
Phoodoo, those 50 ID papers? Any time now…
What do you bet that Phoodoo thinks the X-Files was a documentary?
phoodoo,
Phoodoo,
I don’t actually have an opinion on the matter. I thought I’d made that clear. I was quibbling your statement that there were ‘hundreds and hundreds of books’ supporting your version, which you’d asserted in the same breath as talking of ‘lies and distortion’ from the Wikipedes.
Do paranormal/supernatural skeptics & other materialists tend towards thinking Oswald acted alone? I didn’t realise it had anything to do with metaphysics. His companions, if such there were, were probably flesh and blood, and the bullets made of something.
walto,
You’ve been talking to my wife.
Allan Miller,
Oh brother, there are 100’s of books on the Kennedy assassination controversy. Probably 1000. Your head is still so deep in the sand.
You may not have an opinion on the matter Allan, but the people who bill themselves as skeptics, and who go around doing “guerrilla skeptic” work to insert their opinion into all areas of mainstream media certainly do. Why should a supposed impartial source like Wikipedia be such a biased, propaganda shill for their beliefs? Gerald Posner is a believable source of truth on the subject? Ha.
http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/059/476/iFF/single-bullet.jpg?1384976389
How many people has this bullet struck? How much more does one need to know what a crock of bullshit it all is.
But it gives people comfort to hear Big Picture Science, and Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and Science Friday, and Wikipedia all talk about how the whole conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked. There can never be a conspiracy about anything. Heck Nixon didn’t even conspire to subvert the Presidential election. Let us think for you. Close your mind please.
No its only crazy fringe people who believe in conspiracy theories or who don’t buy into the whole Darwinian evolution proven as fact talking points. Stop thinking please, we will do it for you. Just close your brain and let us tell you all.
Just feed people the daily bullshit, and they don’t need to think anything, just like you and Walto, and Omagain, and the whole gang of skeptic sheep.
I guess I have to count myself among the people who don’t give a shit about the Kennedy assasination, at least in the sense that I’m not an american and it took place before I was born. I could easily see that there’s a number of parties who’d want to get rid of him. But what the hell does it have to do with being “angry at god” ?
I think the NAS revelations confirm that there are secret going on in government. Hell, even New Zealand is having a shitstorm.
But conspiracy theorists aren’t concerned with devising structural protections into government. The concentrate on unprovable gossip that makes no difference, regardless of where the truth lies.
Not to mention, they have some really strange ideas about the physics of building design.
petrushka,
How would you feel if Wikipedia went around trying to make excuses and bullshit, and totally try to whitewash what the NSA really does, so that public perception is completely skewed and inaccurate? What if they printed articles from dubious source which tried to downplay the amount of spying they do, or if they tried to cover it up completely by saying things like, congressional investigations have proven that no one from inside the U.S. has ever had their emails looked at, or if they said, independent investigations have confirmed that the scale of data mining is much much smaller than previously reported, and that all has been done legally and with court orders…
Now, you may know this is a complete lie, but if it gets printed enough, in enough sources, plenty of people are going to believe this. And plenty of people are going to quote this as fact. THIS is the evil of propaganda.
But Allan, and Omagain, and Walto…they say, well, stop whining, there is no cover up. Believe what you are told…
People believe all kinds of bullshit that is beyond my ability to control. Religion is bullshit, but the majority of people believe some form of it.
So in answer to your broader question, I would do what I do now. argue against bullshit.
But I confine myself to things that can be addressed by evidence, and in general rather narrow issues.
Sometimes historical conspiracies are entertaining. I like mystery stories. But they are just entertainment.
I live more in the present, and I would rather argue things that could make a difference, like the war on drugs, or whether police should wear body cameras. These are things where change is possible and even in the works.
You forgot to say “sheeple”. lol
Question, phoodoo: Do you really think it’s possible that Wikipedia could present a worse impression of the ID community than does UD itself?
And if you ask, I’m with Alan M. wrt the Oswald question.
I have no opinion, either. What does that say of the efficacy of skeptic guerrillas?
And what is the alternative to evolution?
This is already happening for a lot of websites. The day wikipedia clearly starts to do this, it will fall in the same category of those shit-spreading sites.
We would stop taking wikipedia as a serious source for certain issues. So?
But in the case of your believes and claims, it is totally different, right? Yours isn’t propaganda, right?
I was alive when Kennedy was assassinated–I was in 6th grade, and was glad that we got sent home. Anything was better than school.
Many years later, my main issue about that day became that a particular favorite of mine–a writer who, incidentally, believed that you could cure near-sightedness by exercise, was a devotee of F.M. Alexander and any number of other quacks and woo–Aldous Huxley, died the same day and….nobody cared. The Kennedy thing knocked him totally out of the news. Huxley believed in as many cuckoo things as you do, phoodoo, but to his credit, he understood that he was gullible. Also, he was a really good writer. You aren’t.
Huxley dropped acid that last day. Presumably, as his “door of perception” was then wide open, he could now tell us whether Oswald had help…..if we would but listen. Anyhow, I have no idea about the Kennedy shooting myself, and couldn’t care less, but as it’s become an issue here, I plan to ask Huxley about it this weekend, using Bob Balaban as my medium.
I’ll keep everybody posted.
phoodoo
Again: I don’t care. Not about this particular issue. And I don’t know why you are so foaming-at-the-mouth about it, nor why you think this is a good example of Wikipedia bias, when we actually started talking of evolution and science. You can find scads of conspiracy detail on Wikipedia itself. Knock yourself out.
Now, those 50 ID papers …
I think perhaps phoodoo should submit his version of a wiki article, to demonstrate how a correct article would look.
phoodoo,
At last, something on which we agree! 🙂 OK, joking, but there is a remarkable set of correlates here. If you believe in ID, you appear very likely to think
1) Wikipedia is systematically biased as an organisation.
2) Psi phenomena are real. Probably all of them.
3) Proponents of psi phenomena are subject to concerted efforts at smear.
4) 9/11 was a put-up job.
5) AGW is a myth
6) HAARP is responsible for [something]
7) Vaccination causes autism and who knows what else
8) We are regularly visited by aliens, and have kept some on ice in the Nevada desert through about 9 changes of administration without the secret getting out.
9) The moon landings were faked.
10) Kennedy was killed by an organisation.
11) Publications on evolutionary theory are controlled by a global gang of conspirators
Have you met David Icke?
Have fun!
(1st banner: They Tried To Ban This Webinar! Sure they did. Not very good at conspiracies, are ‘They’?)
Enough silliness, and on to something important.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/573878/20141124/nuclear-weapons-attack-explosions-aliens-life-mars.htm#.VHTuQCLF_Sg
Ah, more paradigm-shattering research from the Journal of Cosmology. 🙂
My my.
Since Wiki edits remain in its history, where anyone can see them, what phoodoo really objects to is the fact that most people disagree with him.
I moved phoodoo’s latest post to guano as it was outside site rules. To keep continuity, I moved a couple of responses to it there too. Sorry I didn’t spot it earlier.
If only it was crazy fringe people.
Unfortunately, the majority of people in the world are creationists. Most of them don’t try to pretend there is science to their belief in divine creation though.
A huge number of people believe in one conspiracy theory or another too. We are vulnerable to selectively affirming evidence in favour of them.
The actual conspiracies such as right wing media encouraging the less wealthy to act against their own interests, and the institutions that cover up rape and child abuse, as well as silent conspiracies of racism and sexism? People don’t tend to find those quite as interesting.
It’s really fair. But it seems you will have to do it again.
Comment of phoodoo’s moved to Guano.
@ phoodoo,
By all means repost any substantive element of a moved comment. Remember to address arguments rather than calling other commenter liars. Here, we must assume other commenter post in good faith.
You have made up quotes. And you are misunderstanding what people are saying.
Nobody is saying that they don’t value truth. What people are saying, is that the way that use Wikipedia doesn’t depend on whether it is true. They are using it to point them to other sources. They are not relying on what is in Wikipedia as being ultimate truth.
And it’s the same for me. I find Wikipedia to be a useful source of information. But I use it as only one of many sources. So if there are errors in Wikipedia, that’s not going to cause any problems for me.
Says the person who won’t admit if they think remote viewing is real….
Neil Rickert,
Of course one could use other sources besides Wikipedia, but that is not really the point. Wikipedia INTENTIONALLY attempts to give misleading and often downright untrue information to people, in hopes of influencing the narrative of certain subjects in the general database of knowledge.
Its as if textbooks in America were all written to claim that America invented all of the world’s most important inventions, or if they lie about the legacy of Indians prior to our arrival. When textbooks say that the pilgrims were all heroes, and the Indians were all bloodthirsty savages who were subhuman, its not enough to simply say, well, you can go to Indian reservation museums if you want to get more accurate information.
If its a lie with the intention of promoting a certain cultural view, its wrong.
Do you believe in remote viewing?
Sounds like UncommonDescent to me. KF’s posts in particular attempt to make the claims of ID seem scientific, but of course they are not. But it looks like it’s science and for those that don’t understand it, that is enough.
Don’t you ever wonder why, if KF has “billions of examples”, he’s never said “for this example the FSCO/I/CSI/etc value is X”?
The only option open to you is to therefore write your own, accurate, textbook.
Likewise as far as ID goes the only option open to you is to do your own scientific work and prove your claims like that, as let’s face it, talking on UD is not cutting it is it?
For example, search the internet for “FSCO/I”. The only place it appears is on UD. You need to get your knowledge out there!
Sent comments to Guano. Some just for sake of continuity. Please feel free to repost substantive points and post any objections in Moderation Issues.
Out of interest, from those 50 papers how many are about:
A) The insufficiency of Darwinism
B) Positive evidence for ID
C) Uses the phrase “The intelligent designer”.
I’m going to guess
A) 50
B) 0
C) 0
Or do you know better phoodoo?
I don’t agree with that.
Wikipedia has no intentions. Wikipedia is edited by people, who do have intentions. And sometimes those intentions conflict. And sometimes those conflicts get sorted out appropriately, and sometimes they don’t.
Honestly, if you don’t like Wikipedia, then don’t use it. There’s always Conservapedia (and CreationWiki and RationalWiki and others).
Or, even better, download and start your own MediaWiki!
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
Then phoodoo can create a Wiki with the unvarnished truth about JFK, ID “scientists” and whatever else springs to the mind of such a person!
But no, phoodoo will never do that as it’s a bit too much like actual work I suspect!
Neil Rickert,
You don’t agree with it because you haven’t studied the subject enough. Jimmy Wales has clear political worldviews he likes to promote. Its no coincidence that all the slanted worldview issues are the ones that he himself believes in, and preaches about online.
He is an outspoken atheist, and so called science skeptic so its no big surprise that his website uses propaganda to promote that. If there is anything about climate change, evolution, alternate science views, GMO foods, religion, or government issues, you can be sure they will reflect his philosophies.
The irony of that is staggering. How long have you been “studying” evolution for? And yet you must be right about your claims and everyone else wrong, despite how long they’ve been studying it for.
Your projector will need a new lamp soon!
Just like everyone else then, eh?
So start your own Wiki Up and out-compete him! If truth matters then you’ll win!
What, you mean the “website” that’s community edited? You have a couple of options. Make and defend edits that correct what you perceive as being wrong or create a new “Truth based” wiki.
You, of course, won’t do either.
And so what? If you don’t like it, don’t use it. And in any case, I refer to the previous answer. If you don’t like it, make your own and beat him at his own game.
Do you believe in remote viewing? Perhaps you could have a wiki page on your new wiki about that? It won’t take long to add all the positive evidence for it, I’m quite sure.
I have no ability to decide how Jimmy Wales should think. It’s up to him to decide that.
I’ll use Wikipedia as long as I find it useful. What Jimmy Wales might or might not believe is irrelevant to the question of whether Wikipedia is useful.
phoodoo,
What’s the first incorrect statement on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
?
In order to do that via Wikipedia, Wales would have to use either
1) Conventional editing, with full audit trail
2) Editing by subterfuge, a huge amount of work given the need to deal with history and authors noticing that their edits were mysteriously disappearing.
Which method do you think Wales uses? If 1, he is the same as anybody else vis a vis getting edits to stick – he’s up against consensus opinion. If 2 – well, there would be evidence.
Being Boss Of Wikipedia does not of itself give Wales undue influence. There has to be a mechanism by which he exerts that influence, and it has to be at least plausible. So far, you’ve only offered your opinion that he does – you’ve joined up the dots: there’s Atheist Boss, and a certain tone of Wikis on pseudoscientists vs materialist ‘heroes’ (and Lee Harvey Oswald, how the fuck did he get in here? 🙂 ).
Pretend you’re Wales. What would you do to make sure your worldview trumped that of the editing herd? Be bold.
If I were an IDer, I would be less concerned with Wikipedia and more concerned that the ID community is utterly hapless when it comes to propagating its own message. Consider the string of failed ID journals that have come and gone over the last several years. UD is a spectacle that likely drives away more potential converts than it brings in. And there really is no coherent message to begin with. You have people touting multiple mutually exclusive hypotheses under the ID banner, including YECs, frontloaders, and the biosemiosis crowd, which is gathering momentum as we speak.
On the other hand, outfits such as AIG and ICR do a much better job of getting the Word out, so to speak. I live in a rural small town and listen to Christian radio during long commutes, and I often hear radio spots produced by ICR and other programs and interviews concerning creationism. Have you looked at AIG’s ARJ journal? I don’t read it myself, but it’s beautifully produced, looks “sciencey” enough, yet is accessible to the non-specialist. And it has been published since 2008 without folding.
I’m sure ICR and AIG do their share of complaining about bias in the media, but at least they are joining the battle rather than standing passively on the sidelines.
(edited for clarity)
And your evidence for that is that it disagrees with you. Which at least means that Wikipedia has that much going for it.
Now why would they intentionally attempt to mislead and present untruths? That’s the primary IDiot problem, in fact, because ID has no evidence for it and its promoters can only really whine that people are out to deny things like eternal life, truth, goodness, etc. Because Satan, I guess (rarely said by them, but I rather suspect that’s the answer for most of them)..
Wikipedia has serious problems, in my view, not least of which is that phoodoo can go there and edit. That’s why it’s only considered to be an encyclopedia, not a source for truth at all. The references cited and linked may get one closer, but of course those are no guarantee of truth, either. It always has to go back to the evidence, or at least to reports of evidence common among researchers (most of us will never be able to deal directly with, say, the bones of Lucy, but we should generally be able to trust what several experts agree about the facts of those bones), and phoodoo seems unaware of this truth. No researcher would admit to relying on Wikipedia, and I’m sure that almost none does, and Wikipedia mostly reports what the actual researchers report, at least in matters of fact like the Kennedy assassination. Quite rightly, they do not cite as truth the appalling conspiracy theories of the uninformed.
IDiots and Kennedy assassination mythologists could change Wikipedia–and far more importantly, official statements and papers–by coming up with evidence for their useless claims. They don’t.
Glen Davidson
One reason that ICR and AIG are more successful than UD and ENV is that they are honest in promoting religion. So they can speak directly to fundamentalists (of which there is no shortage) and request financial support. They have a slick package, refined for nearly a century, and their followers are not fussy about things like consilience.
There are a few IDists who openly admit that the designer is god. Behe and gpuccio stand out in my memory. Because their designer is omnipotent and omniscient, and because he is traditionally described as inscrutable, a theistic IDist does not have to get tangled up in questions of when, how and why.
Then there is the branch of ID known as theistic evolution. the Catholic church being the most visible exemplar. These folks generally accept the broad outline of science based natural history. Age of the earth does not trouble them. Common descent does not trouble them. All they require is that evolution’s dice are loaded to produce humans. Perhaps from the beginning, or perhaps in a more recent intervention event.
What distinguished UD and ENV is their desire to overturn consensus science, across a broad spectrum of findings. One rather obvious reason they fail is that their program is incoherent. They do not even agree with each other as to whether the earth is young or old, or whether common descent is true. When they argue as a group — as at UD — they trample over each other’s feet. They nitpick consensus biology — usually by amplifying differences at the cutting edge — but present no alternative. They seem to think that if their opponent doesn’t show up for the game, they win by default.
But, because they present no actual alternative, they have no natural community of supporters, other than a few dozen internet followers.
What’s strange about phoodoo, along with nearly all poofists, is their reliance upon “evidence” whenever it suits them. Not just picking and choosing whatever they like, but making claims that rely on physical constraints when it pleases them, while denying same when limits threaten their beliefs. I mean, why couldn’t Oswald be a magic man who could shoot a bullet from the Book Depository and from the grassy knoll at the same time? I haven’t bothered reading phoodoo’s particular “facts,” so whether he’s on about grassy knolls and magic bullets or not I really don’t know or care, the question is why empirically-demonstrated constraints have to apply to Oswald and not to magic designer. Or to evolution, for that matter–aside from the fact that we insist on them (why do they get to rail against non-magic evolution when they have no reason to exclude magic themselves? And when they do opt for magic, what excuse for designer magic rather than magic inherent to the universe, say?).
You can be a non-magic Kennedy-assassination conspiracist, of course, loony, but no believer in magic or the supernatural. The beauty of those is that they’re fading now mainly because not many people really care much about it any more (most anyone who might have conspired to kill JFK would be dead by now anyway–so it’d be interesting as hell if real evidence for them did exist, while not much would actually change), and it’s more than a bit bizarre for phoodoo to be yammering on about it when no one here seems to care a whole lot (I know enough to have my opinion, but would never become expert enough to claim a definitive judgment about it, because it really is just history). But what’s especially bizarre is when constraints apply to Oswald but not to biology, or to Targ, or to Dembski’s faith healer (Dembski did note the failure, but didn’t concede the likely reason they all fail to heal autistic kids).
It’s the kind of thing that bothered me growing up as a theist, even as I learned that I wasn’t supposed to be “credulous” about strange phenomena, yet I was supposed to believe in Biblical miracles, like creation. That is to say, the compartmentalization did occur, it just didn’t manage to seal everything off from each other, and it eventually failed.
The logic always fails, no matter how strong the compartmentalization.
Glen Davidson
I think it’s pretty obvious that if you have a limb amputated, or have an autistic or Mongoloid child, that god intended it to be that way, and isn’t going to change it. So suck it up.
Words to the wise.
Or to Dembski, anyway.
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller,
Alan, If I write an edit that says Stephen Meyers books have been widely regarded and have brought up many unanswerable questions about the Cambrian explosion and other problems with the theory of evolution, and then list five paragraphs of positive reviews by other biologists, and then you write that Stephen Meyers books have been widely rejected as inaccurate and poorly evidenced, followed by five paragraphs of some schmuck from the Skeptics Society webpage ; who decides which edit stays?
I notice you would rather argue politics than discuss which statement is correct. This is why the ID movement is so pathetic,
Great point. If psi phenomena, aliens, etc. are real–and Oswald could make use of them, he wouldn’t have needed any help–no matter what the evidence seems to indicate. The wikipedia/atheist/skeptic bastards have their use, obviously, to produce data that phoodoo and his buddies can suggest are inconsistent with a scientific worldview. As you say the logic there is very very bad.
Anybody can put in material. Anybody can take out material. It’s just doggedness. You obviously have THAT going for you–you just prefer to use it whining at places like this. Go edit some wikipedia articles. I mean, if enough people think you’re crapping up an article and the site generally you’ll likely get booted after a couple of warnings, but that’s a policy that’s both necessary and sensible (which is why I think it should be adopted here too and and not fibbed about after use at UD).
I don’t think this site is like an indexed reference. This is a chat room, and its temperature rises and falls. Each of us argues his case, but there is seldom a consensus.
Encyclopedias are different. I think it’s great to have people arguing in the background, but there has to be a consensus article.