Why for your e-mail address does not work?

At least this one did not: rhanson@gmn.edu

I wrote you an email about “ViewQuakes” and requested a response only to have it come back. So, PLEASE E-me at: religionsucks@webtv,net

THANKS

Neil

“A View Quacker”

P.S. “Reason” helps a believer? GIVE ME A BREAK!

Reason Child, is why MILLIONS & MILLIONS & MILLIONS or FORMER Christians have STOPPED believing in your
childish myth and become Atheists.

You make an interesting point, but I think it is flawed. You do present some strong reasons why Todd might not exist, but comparing Todd with God is not an apt approach to take. Todd is an individual within a concrete set of boundaries: the family home, with limited access to that space. Thus, the differing descriptions of one distinct physical individual would be sketchy to anyone investigating this case.

Religious believers, on the other hand, claim distinct experiences with different manifestations of God at different times and in different circumstances. These experiences do seem to show some consistency with the idea of God and thus, are not contradictory. The contradictions tend to come from the interpretations of these texts as done by the believers in their own situations.

As an example, all three monotheistic religions recognize Jesus:
- Judaism recognizes Jesus as a heretic (or a prophet, depending on who you talk to – I don’t want to split hairs here though).
- Christianity recognizes Jesus as the Messiah.
- Islam recognizes Jesus as a major prophet.

Thus, there is some consensus around the main claims of Jesus. Does that mean that Jesus does or doesn’t exist? No. The evidence isn’t sufficient enough either way here.

So, all three faiths make mention of Jesus. They interpret him differently. Other dogmatic discussions occur for numerous other religious topics. Does disagreement mean that the subject doesn’t exist? Not at all… in fact, based on the great deal of discussion and early source documentation pointing to the subject (God), I’d argue that there is some strong justifications to believe.

Ultimately, the question becomes one of epistemology. And, with all things dealing with truth, we never can be too sure. As a Christian, reason helps me, but ultimately there is some level of faith involved. But, isn’t faith also involved when you look at other worldviews?

Feel free to check out my blog (http://toddhdow.org/) for plenty more discussion on this topic.

Thanks and talk soon!

Todd Dow
http://toddhdow.org/

Eliezer, I am still suspicious that your different way of putting things may be an indicator of some real disagreement, it would be helpful if you actually wrote that paper to explain.

I guess you can just ignore the morality-as-computation stuff for now, that would probably take a paper to explain if I wanted to express it. Nick, Robin, just because an opinion is comparatively briefly expressed doesn’t mean it’s a jump to a conclusion. It can be something that was worked out over quite a long period, but heavily compressed. I don’t know in advance what will or will not create an Aha! experience in others – apparently this didn’t, but it was still worth a shot.

Let me explain what I mean by “ultimate reality”.

For example last night I was dreaming and in that dream, a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in an airplane flying over Honolulu. Fortunately, it was just a “fizzle”, so only a few tons of nuclear energy were released.

But then I woke up, and discovered that what I thought was reality was actually just me dreaming.

So in that sense, compared to the dream I was having, that dream was unreal, and this waking reality is more real (although perhaps not ultimately real).

In the same way, perhaps this seeming world we live in is itself similar to a dream. In fact, Robin has speculated on the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation. So if that is the case, it might be possible to discover that while still “within” the simulation. That would be akin to the phenomena of lucid dreaming, where one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while the dream is happening.

In that event, what we know of as our lives here would be similar to my dream, and ultimate reality would be something quite different.

Of extremely high practical relevance, the conclusion that the highest priority for almost any sort of ethically concerned person is to reduce the probability of existential risk by encouraging the development of Friendly Artificial Intelligence does not constitute a ‘boringly normal’ output, but rather, a counterintuitive one.

Simon: I think that you need to learn about the difference between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy.