Phi for All

Then you mean rational. Logic is for maths and philosophy. Forget what Spock said, Mr Scott. Don't like religion, don't feel like studying formal science? Both are full of hidebound folks who don't have your unique understanding?

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/17/505965420/study-communities-most-affected-by-opioid-epidemic-also-voted-for-trump It seems clear that folks hurting financially have been turning to opioid use, and were desperate enough to idolize someone wealthy who promised to fix it. We all know how difficult it is to talk to someone rationally who came to a conclusion emotionally, and these folks have to be absolutely wrung out by a system that leeches from them far more than it helps. How did this get to be a case of the pain of poverty and opioid addiction versus the ruthlessness of extreme wealth and money addiction? How frustrating is it that they support him so fervently?

If "most logical" meant "makes the most sense to me".

Very well put. And every week they do more to whittle away at the regulations that are in place to keep just such from happening. If Americans were ever asked straight out if they want to remove more regulations that allow extremist wealthy folks to get away with murder, the vast majority would say no. And that's not how our leadership votes.

We're making progress if conservatives are launching instead of lynching. It wasn't that long ago....

There are bacteria that have a reddish hue which thrive close enough to the surface to get sunlight. You can see it from shore, and don't have to be that high above it. I don't know if that's how the Red Sea got it's name. That's historically been a pretty bloody part of the world.

This is what it looks like when the only people being represented are those wealthy enough to skew results unnaturally and force their viewpoint on the rest of the population. Enough wealth buys you tailor-made news coverage (since the news no longer is required to truthfully inform), social media storms painting whatever picture suits your agenda, and lobbyists who will actually make your illicit gains legal. This country is NOT made up of moderate conservatives and extreme conservatives, but that's the way our representatives vote, compared to the rest of the major nations. That should tell us we have no representation that isn't bought with extreme wealth.

Charlottesville has nothing on Coeur d'Alene.

Your reasoning is fallacious. It's an Argument from Incredulity. You're saying, "I don't understand how it could be possible, therefore it isn't." Events and phenomena that happen all by themselves are still governed by the physics that seems to work everywhere we look. It can seem managed and mechanized, but you could say the same thing about how the ocean regularly and mechanically manages to wear down mountains.

You toggled your checker from "spelling" to "irony" again, didn't you? And that's why it's hard to argue with faith. When something you've dreamt up makes such perfect sense to you, the emotional emphasis makes the idea SEEM tangible. You become convinced you're right, and you're sure there's a good way to explain it but you can never come up with the reasoning, it always seems just out of reach.

WRT a deity who actually requests belief without support, like the Abrahamic god, I think it IS disrespectful to look for evidence to support your faith. It was considered a breach of faith to require the son of god to prove himself by showing his disciples the face of his father. Religious/mystical/supernatural beliefs are unique in that they don't require any trustworthy outside verification to match them with what we observe in nature, and that's why I insist on a separate definition for that type of belief, that's why we call it faith. The same is applicable to any unobservable higher power people choose to believe in. If there's no evidence to support its existence, you're using faith to believe in it. It's power is to unite people strongly, hopefully for good reasons. Faith in the basic goodness of humanity is not a bad thing. That's partly why I think using faith is dangerous for a single human developing their belief system. It's like going into the jungle for the first time by parachuting alone into the middle with nothing but your faith, absolutely 100% assured you know the best route out.

This isn't the first time you've shifted your stance in the face of reasoned arguments. I appreciate your use of critical thought in discussion with science-minded folks. I want you to know I realize how hard you're trying to express your ideas, but I also appreciate that you aren't as intractable as you were in the beginning of this discussion. But by starting inward, you don't have knowledge from outward that you may need. Are you trying to figure out where the pieces fit without stepping back to look at the whole first? Again, I think that's a mistake. It doesn't matter what you have faith in, explaining anything by starting on the inside of it is going to seriously mess with your conclusions. Answers tend to be subjective in nature. Answers, when we think we've found them, tend to end our curiosity about the subject, and we then tend to keep confirming our biases about those "answers". They become dogma because we've stopped looking for anything better. Science looks for the best supported explanations, always. Ideas aren't "right" or "correct", they're either falsified or unfalsified, and the unfalsified ideas are constantly being attacked to see if they hold up under harsh scrutiny. These ideas MUST match what we observe in nature, as free from our human cognitive biases as possible. I think you make a mistake focusing inward before you understand what's going on outward. I think you make a mistake looking for "answers"; the search for knowledge is ongoing and works best when you're methodical in taking it on board. Faith as a form of belief, to me, is leaping to conclusions. It's belief that doesn't bother to measure how far the leap is, or feel for how much wind is blowing, or even check to see if the landing is safe. That's why I don't trust it, but I understand why it's easier for some folks.

So you've chosen to focus inward to the exclusion of knowledge of the natural world. I think that's a mistake. It seems like trying to fix the notes of a song without playing/singing it through first. Or like trying to guess all the infinite possibilities of what might be inside a package without first trying to look at it from the outside, and at least measure the box (with all your senses) so you have a better idea of what it could hold. Or like deciding that you don't need to walk carefully across the lake of thin ice if you focus on leaping only to the bits that look safe.

Quantum321 has been banned for abusing the PM system. Folks, the rules are really clear, and no matter how passionate you are about your ideas, please remember we're all here voluntarily, and we've chosen civility as our #1 rule. Nobody gets threatened here. We attack ideas, not people.

I said science doesn't look for truth, or to prove anything, but it's extremely good at disproving things that aren't true. Nobody is saying faith doesn't exist, or even that it needs disproving. It's what you believe using faith that can be shown false if you claim it's true. Does that make sense to you? You can have faith in your higher power and science shrugs, but when you claim His image is burned into your bathroom towel, we can't take that on faith, and we must examine the evidence. Faith is a form of belief that persists without support from nature. It's a form of belief that is completely opposite from trust, which requires a lot of evidence.