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?
Indeed, that “bullshit view” of reality has been spectacularly unproductive. Or not.
Most scientists do, and that’s all that matters. And scientists are the most skeptical of them all – they have to be, it’s their job.
All you have to do to convince a scientist that you have a better way of looking at a problem is demonstrate that your alternative is more fruitful.
But you can’t actually do that can you, hence your cognitive dissonance.
It’s not “the truth” you are reading at UD, it’s “science twisted into a pretzel so it confirms to what you already think”.
Well, you are more then free to join this thread created to discuss problem you said have no answers:
But you will never do that because you know how it will go. You are not interested in “the truth”.
I suppose we aren’t going to get the unanswerable questions about the Cambrian.
According to the NY Times, if was Rob Corddry in 2004.
This is what the fabulous Paul Krugman has to say about it:
NOT GENUINE INTEREST IN THE FACTS.
That’s all you need to know about any person who self-identifies as conservative / rightwing / evangelical / libertarian / republican / wikipedia-hater / etc etc etc.
Good to know that you have that wrapped up and hermetically sealed against any intrusive ideas.
The mere fact that someone claims that there are unanswerable questions appears to be sufficient for phoodoo.
That’s all that matters – the claim. Cargo cult science in action.
That seems to be a universal human tendency. I’m sure I have a subconscious list of obvious truths. Unfortunately , I can only see other people’s.
OMagain,
Questions are easy. Answers are hard.
Asking good questions is hard.
And that brings up something I hadn’t considered until just now. Unanswerable questions are rubbish. They aren’t useful to science. If meyer or phoodoo wants to contribute to science, they need to ask answerable questions.
I think questions are hard if you are afraid you might believe the answers.
Yes, but I am just thinking that formulating questions that suggest empirical research is hard. I have often asked IDists to formulate a research program that would be useful. (Axe and Gauger have one that isn’t.)
It’s fairly easy to ask unanswerable questions, Somewhat more difficult to formulate unanswered questions whose solutions are almost, but not entirely out of reach. I give you Shubin’s Tiktaalik as an example of a difficult, but not impossible, bit of research.
Perhaps Meyer or phoodoo could suggest some hypothetical bit of research that would support ID.
Does it have to? It is obvious there might be biased. It is obvious an entry might be pure bullshit, like someone saying evolution is not science or ID is a scientific theory. The construction of these articles takes time.
Of course, YOU are not leaving out facts intentionally, and YOU are not making a biased crtitique of wikipedia based on your preferred worldview, and you are not trying to leave us with the false impression that you wish to present a balanced viewpoint, DO YOU?
You mean YOU giving the facts to let us decide? I remeber quite a few questions YOU DENIED to answer. Still, you talk as if you had the truth on your side. Sorry, mister, wikipedia is MUCH MORE TRASNPARENT than you are.
Interesting!! If it’s atheists (non religious) vs theists (religious), where would you expect religious motivation for childish dishonesty?
And what’s the truth? Will you give me the facts so I can decide? Or are you just being childishly dishonest?
I honestly think Wikipedia strives to be neutral. Hence the whole NPOV thang. Of course, if you are a conspiracist, that very principle is just a smokescreen. Yet it is referred to constantly in arbitration of disputes. Why write a principle, which people use, if your ‘secret’ intention is not to be neutral?
I think that if you lie at an extreme, ‘neutral’ looks like the opposite pole. phoodoo’s real complaint (and he is very representative of the conservative USian) seems to be that Wikipedia is insufficiently biased.
I will grant that there is bias at Wikipedia. Editors are (largely) self-selecting, and come from particular groups, and so articles may well reflect their interests and views. But phoodoo is accusing it of conscious bias – that there is an organisational slant upon edits. I don’t see how that is implemented.
I would be interested to see a sensible study done comparing WP to (say) online Britannica, with its largely single-author pieces. Or a blind ‘tasting’ – run a series of random encyclopedia articles past a WP-skeptic and have them determine the Wikipedian ones. Controlling for remote-viewing capability, obviously. 🙂
Wikipedia *is* biased, but towards the reality based community.
That’s why it’s hated by ID supporters. They have to justify their claims on Wikipedia and as they can’t it’s “bias” that their edits are removed.
It’s not that surprising. After all, the worldwide conspiracy of scientists of all religions and no religion to keep ID down has time on their hands these days, ID’s been falling out of favour since Dover killed any chance of ID getting into schools (which seems to be what the money wants) so they’ve plenty of time to make Wiki edits.
Yes, indeed. It’s telling that they spend so much effort talking about evilution and Darwin when that effort would be better spent on something that they do not thing is wrong from the start!
Positive evidence for ID seems to be very low on the priority list for your average ID supporter or even leader.
Encyclopedia Frown
Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess.
By David Auerbach
“Given the anarchy at work, it’s impressive that article quality should reach as high as it can, even if it’s still not reliable. Yet the nature of the beast makes quality control inconsistent. Recently, an adequate and fairly neutral page on “Cultural Marxism,” which traced the history of Marxist critical theory from Lukács to Adorno to Jameson, simply disappeared thanks to the efforts of a single editor. Rather than folding it into the narrower but deeper “Critical theory” page, the editor replaced the page with one on the “Frankfurt school conspiracy theory,” which obsessively and somewhat offensively dwells on the Jewish presence in these schools of thought and the right-wing and borderline anti-Semitic conspiracy theories around them. (The reason the editor dwelled on these irrelevant conspiracy theories instead of the thinkers themselves is unknown, but the changes are certainly troubling.) After bewildered complaints, Wales restored the original page and asked for an extra week’s debate on the sudden and drastic shift, sparking outrage from a cabal of editors who favored the change. Whether the change will win out will be determined less by truth and more by the stubbornness and comparative popularity of the editors and the administrators backing them.”
“As it turned out, I’d run into a couple of what one Wikipedia administrator terms “The Unblockables,” a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium.”
“Jimbo Wales is a dishonest cunt of the highest order,”
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.single.html
Oh, and by the way, you guys on this site are a bunch of uniformed sheep.
phoodoo:
With epaulets? I like epaulets.
Wikipedia seems prone to some horrible name-calling at times:
Source
I just really don’t think there’s any place for claiming that the brothers grazed their family and other cattle at Bingham Canyon.
Glen Davidson
phoodoo,
Yep, that‘s the way to get your point across! See also: “I have no argument as such, so bite this …”.
OK, let’s read David Auerbach … ah yes, in that very article he wrote this:
“its strengths and weaknesses stem largely from the fact that there is no central authority with its hand on the tiller.” [my italics]
The hell he says! But … but … what about Wales and his Illuminati?
Incidentally, the quote about ‘Jimbo’ and a part of female anatomy does not actually appear in the article, though you dressed it in quotes which make it look as if it did. I’m sure you’d want to rectify such journalistic sloppiness.
No, no, no. Making it clear that it’s his own editorial opinion and not a quote from the article or objective fact would be, you know, biased.
I had to read twice to get the joke. Well spotted!
Yes, that’s why the thing that we think is right is doing so badly against the thing you think is right.
Best rush back to KF and listen to his latest pearls of wisdom regarding whatever alphabet soup acronym is proving ID these days.
Still waiting for those “unanswerable” questions by the way – what do you suppose the lurkers make of your hit and run tactics?
phoodoo is a product of it’s environment – UD. As such this is simply normal behaviour, you damm sheeple!
phoodoo,
Did you know that once upon a time there was an ID wiki?
Do you know what happened to it? Can you guess?
I wish I had a copy, but I’m afraid it’s long gone.
You can read about it here: http://creationwiki.org/ResearchID.org
But in essence what I’m trying to say is stop being such a whiny bitch and *do something* about what you see as a problem.
Just start another ID wiki and watch as nobody comes to edit or improve it because no bastard is actually interested apart from the dozen people here and the two dozen at UD. Then, perhaps, when *your* project has fallen flat on it’s face you’ll start to understand why people point and laugh at ID rather then feeling threatened by it.
chuckle. UD thought the ID wiki would be a storming success. Little did they realise that ID for most ID supporters is not about research, just patting each other on the back.
And what is it now? A spam site selling the latest crap to the morons who think crap is not crap.
Here is one of the few pages captured by archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110923234306/http://www.researchid.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
So I’d rather be an *uniformed sheep* then an ID supporter with delusions of doing real science.
If anyone could register and contribute, why did it fail?
Allan Miller,
Oh, its not in the article. I just made it up? Hm. Interesting take Allan.
And you even got the sheep to follow you.
You don’t like what already exists but are unwilling to make your own. That’s why you and yours get nowhere. The only conspiracy is a conspiracy of laziness.
phoodoo,
OK, I admit I actually missed it. I only searched page 1, my bad. Nonetheless, it is a quote of Corbett, quoted by Auerbach. You placed 3 quotations in quote marks, 2 of which were arguments by Auerbach and one a … uh … opinion piece by someone Auerbach was quoting. It was rather misleading.
Quoted with context:
I withdraw part of my accusation. The text is indeed in the article.
Show us your view as a non-sheep. So far, you complain a lot, but you hide your views. Why could that be?
For example, let’s assume for a moment that wikipedia is a terrible source, lot of bias, lies, all you say… So what?