Trump Takes On The Pope - The Ramblings Of A Madman ?

There are some other even more serious problems with democracy in America. Perhaps I might mention a few.

First there is campaign financing. In most democratic systems including the UK, there are legal limits to the expenditure of candidates on their campaigns. Not so in USA, where there is nothing to prevent a billionaire buying up the political process. Every candidate, to compete, is obliged to raise huge sums in contributions which have to come mainly from wealthy and corporate donors. Every successful candidate is indebted to those donors, unless he is a billionaire. This exchange of private money for political favours is so commonplace and so universal it is no longer even considered as corruption.

Second there is redistricting. Each of the 435 members of the House of Representatives sits for a geographically defined constituency. The constituency borders are set by each of the 50 State legislatures. Many constituencies have highly artificial, convoluted borders designed to distort outcomes. The Republican Party has had a long, sustained campaign of gerrymandering borders whenever and wherever it has had power to do so. As a result several states with a majority of Democrat voters nevertheless return more Republican congressmen. [This does not apply to the Senate].

Third there is voter registration and identity. Registration as a voter is not obligatory nor automatic. It requires effort on the part of the citizen, so that poor, black, and latino folk are less likely to be registered especially in some southern states. Plus on election day some states require voters to produce state-issued photo ID. Since there is no universal ID card system, and since most Americans do not have passports, this is usually a driving licence. A percentage of people do not have driving licences (mainly the poor, black, and latino ones), so they are put to inconvenience and expense to obtain ID, failing which they are not allowed to vote.

There are other issues, but perhaps these three are enough to be going on with. The effect of all this is that although on the basis of sheer numbers, the Democratic Party ought to have a massive inbuilt majority, the Republican Party has managed to overcome this by various strategies.

 

I thought this thread was about the rather entertaining collision between politics and theology, exemplified by the recent Trump/Bergoglio spat. Why step away from it now?

 

JR, you've started a thread about religion and politics and you're worried about people falling out...:Banghead:

 

If the viewpoint you purport to advance is a sheer assertion based on no evidence or reason whatever, and you know that is the case, then that means you know it is not true, i.e. you know that the prerequisites for something to be true are lacking. Advancing the assertion in these circumstances is exactly equivalent to lying, is it not?

This is the essence of religious faith: it means believing things which are not true. Believing things which really are true does not require faith.

 

I don't think it is so clear cut. The religious fall back on their book or books which they accept as history, however ridiculous that may appear to the enquiring mind. Hence they think their faith is backed up by something. I don't think, therefore, that they can be regarded as liars.

 

One question is whether there is an important difference between repeating lies made up by somebody else, and making them up yourself. Another question is whether there is an important difference between lies made up centuries ago, and those made up only recently. I am inclined to think it neither point makes very much difference - they are still lies. What do you think?

 

I think the point at issue here is whether asserting something (be it correct, incorrect or unproven), but with no intention to deceive, can be referred to as "lying".

Is this the right time to roll out the old mens rea argument?

 

You can't, you're not God. :Smuggrin:

 

It's just 2 heads of multi-national businesses,( who suck wealth and will from many different areas of the globe for their own, and their businesses propagation and enrichment ), butting heads on independent ego trips.

 

Pete, to summarise, I think you're saying is that there has been no concrete evidence to back up the belief in God. I agree. You then take a jump and effectively say that people who believe in God are liars. First, I am talking about belief and that doesn't require evidence. Second, believing something unproven does not make you a liar though it could make you mistaken.
You bringing in the idea of lying suggests to me that you are thinking about the spreading of belief in God and that if you spread that belief then you are a liar. Well, no. Not if you truly believe in the existence of God. Think about it like this. Every one of us has our own unique reality, aspects of which may have commonality with aspects of someone else's reality. In the true believer's reality God exists. When a true believer asks you to accept God into your life he is asking you to accept that part of his reality as a part of your own reality. There is no attempt to deceive so there is no lie. At worst, there is delusion.

I've never heard of mens rea but if you lead I'll follow.

 

Mens rea means 'guilty mind'. In the case of criminal offences, for some types of offence the prosecution has to persuade the court that the defendant not only did the act but also intended harm by it. Here's a simple example: Say I barged into you, knocking you over. This was, on the face of it, an assault which I committed. But actually a piano was about to fall on your head, and I pushed you away only in order to save your life. No guilty intention, no mens rea, I'm not guilty of assault. There are other types of offence which are 'absolute'; mens rea is not relevant, for example, licencing offences. The law requires you to obtain a licence before you do X, the perpetrator did X without a licence and thus is guilty. Intention does not come into it

In this context we are discussing people who make untrue statements which they may believe to be true, although that belief may be based on delusion, misunderstanding, or dim-wittedness. The question then is this: Is an untrue statement nevertheless not a lie if the speaker imagines it to be true and thus does not believe he is lying? A subordinate question to this is the following: If a speaker merely repeats without understanding a lie made up by somebody else, is the speaker thereby lying or not?

These questions are, I think, simpler than they look. In everyday life all of us are continually told things by people like work colleagues, family members, salesmen, journalists, and politicians. We evaluate them by ordinary standards of evidence, reason, and likelihood, and we make up our minds whether things we are told are true or not. If we encounter extraordinary assertions for which support is lacking, we readily decide they are not true. This equates to deciding the speaker is lying; we do not trouble whether the salesman is creating his own lies, repeating lies created by others, or if he really believes his own bullshit.

But a strange double standard creeps in sometimes. An unsupported (or preposterous) assertion made by a bishop, rabbi, or imam is somehow given more credence than an assertion of a salesman or a politician. The religious assertion is assumed to be true unless somebody can prove it is not; for every other assertion, the burden of substantiating it lies on the person making it, and nobody has to disprove anything.

The atheist position is simply to apply the same standards of truth and falsehood to all matters, allegedly supernatural ones along with everything else. An atheist doesn't believe in any doctrines, and has no need to prove or disprove anything whatever.

 

You are still making what appears to be an unconscious assumption here (in red).

Your argument is self-referential.
A follower/believer of, say, The Flying Spaghetti Monster sees nothing extraordinary in asserting his beliefs, whatever they may be. In order for your argument to be intrinsically true, there has to be a standard for what constitutes "extraordinary".

That's easy for most "rational" people, in most circumstances.
The existence of a FSM is unproven/unprovable/not subject to refutation, and is unlikely to exist.
Physical laws on the macro scale are generally not perceived to be "extraordinary" and assertions based upon such laws seem reasonable, to reasonable people.
Quantum mechanics are perhaps a grey area: we are led to believe that some "unreasonable" behaviours are indeed reasonable, if not predictable. Still.

Nevertheless, your argument seems to be that what is generally held to be extraordinary, requires extraordinary proof to be accepted. That is simply another way of stating the issue at hand, how do you evaluate an assertion of extraordinary content? What is "extraordinary"? You imply that extraordinary is what a consensus of scientists says it is. Self-referential.

 

can we quantify well being? just because i say i feel good in me head dont make it true. if believing in GSM makes me feel good inside how can i be believed?

 

I don't believe you just asked that, finm.

 

ach you no me. anything for an argument.

 

OK, @Loz perhaps "extraordinary" is a redundancy. I can manage very well without it.

The discussion is about assertions made without justification in the form of evidence or reasoning. An assertion like "This is a chair" or Pythagoras's theorem is easy to verify. Assertions about (say) gene splicing or exoplanets are not so obvious, but with some effort they can clearly be verified or disproved by evidence in the form of experiment or observation. Assertions about as yet undiscovered scientific phenomena may be purely hypotheses at present (so that nobody is yet claiming they are true), but also be in principle verifiable or falsifiable at some future date; that will determine whether they are true or not .

Then there is a different category of assertions: those which not only are not supported by evidence or reasoning, but are in principle incapable of being verified or falsified by any possible means. Assertions about gods, angels, the flying spaghetti monster, and the invisible intangible dragon in my garage fall into this category. Since they are unverifiable and unfalsifiable, they are meaningless and indistinguishable from lies. A billion such assertions can be made up, and they are all equally meaningless. The hilarious part is where somebody fails to grasp that "unfalsifiable" means it's therefore rubbish, and drifts away into a fantasy world in which "unfalsifiable" means 'nobody's proved it wrong so it must be true'.

 

I'd say we are discussing people who make statements based on unsubstantiated belief. I think there is maybe something in this distinction that points to a fundamental difference in our thinking. Is it that you are taking an absolutist stance? I'm know I'm not because I struggle with it because of the little I've read on, e.g.

, Godel's Theorm, Phenomenology and Existentialism.

I don't think things are as simple as you would believe. You say:

From your own argument, if there is no hard evidence to support your lack of trust are you then stuck until evidence is found? Or do you act on your lack of trust even with the lack of hard evidence? To act without evidence is to make a decision based on belief alone. Does that then make you a liar?

 

Better, Pete. B+