No matter how much you investigate the matter you can never change subjective perceptions.
I touched on that in my titanic post, when I covered the
incorrigibility of experience. As such, I agree with this statement.
No matter how much information you provide or how many ideas you ponder nothing can disprove or approve what is right or wrong. You will never be able to prove the Bible is fact or fiction because you will never be able to gather enough evidence in this physical realm.
I agree with this statement also. You can't prove things without a doubt. There's always some doubt, due to things like the Problem of Other Minds, lacking empirical corroboration, and so on. This is why, for example, science is said to be a
provisional enterprise -- you can't ever be
truly certain that what you discover is true.
As for me, I'm just a guy on a laptop, typing away (albeit at a fast pace, which is why I'm able to whip up huge posts). I don't have much power or influence on anything.
But what I
can do is respond to your claims. If you present a claim, I can respond to it. I can analyze, dissect, compare, contrast, refute, underline, and more. Then, I can decide not what is
absolutely correct, but what is
most probable, or
most plausible.
In our discussion topic, demonic influence is not the only plausible explanation for why cross-dressing exists, and why we should or should not engage in it. Debate demands that we consider all the possible solution, and assess which is more probable and reasonable. I currently suspect the views I have formed by using this method of comparison are the most probable and plausible, as opposed to the theistic proposition. You would say that you hold to the inverse (theistic explanation > naturalist explanation).
In the end, we debate not truths, but probabilities.
If you have to write essays to discover or prove this obvious fact than I feel sorry for you. I never said you weren't intelligent I just stated you probably aren't intelligent enough to provide some life changing philosophical insight on why the Bible is or isn't viable. In the end you can deny the Bible completely and live your life freely and in the end there won't be a heaven and hell and Christianity may be entirely fiction. Or you can die and go to hell due to not believing Jesus Christ and the Bible. It's all about faith and while the Bible's teaching seem unlikely due to scientific discoveries and historic documentation you still can't prove it's impossible.
I don't plan on giving a monumentally profound refutation of Christianity, nor did I during the writing of my other posts. Neither do I think that I'm capable of it. As said above, all I'm doing is responding to your claims
as they are -- as I have done for all theistic claims I have come across, or have been presented with, thus far. That's the only thing I can do, so that's what I do.
You don't need to feel sorry for me to writing long posts, by the way. Firstly because I'm not trying to engage in a futile one-man crusade against God in a subsection of a Smash Bros. fan site. But also because I love to write, and I type fast (and have some free time on my hands), so writing is never any trouble for me.
Lastly, you touch on notes of Pascal's Wager, here. Better to believe in God, since if there is no God, then when I die, it ends. But if there is a God, then I am hellbound. Since I can't tell whether God does or does not exist
for certain, best to play it safe and believe in God.
The issue with that, of course, is that my faith is not genuine, motivated only by self-preservation. Or is that really what faith is? Faith is a foreign, alien concept to me -- likely because I have never had any firsthand experiences that could qualify as spiritual or divine, by any definition. That must certainly, at least in part, account for why this whole God story seems highly fantastical to me. It's very imaginative stuff, and thus fun to think about, but to believe it's true,
and to structure my whole life around that stuff? A much bolder proposition.
You're belief is as viable and meaningful than the average strict biased Christian's belief. It's all subjectivity and this debate is nothing more than that. It's an argument of people trying to convince one another their own fictional subjective ideology is the correct one. Completely pointless.
If debates are futile because people have subjective views that can never change, then why debate at all? Perhaps I should contact @
Sucumbio and ask that he bring up the closure of the Debate Hall section with the rest of the forum staff.
The point of debate -- at least, in my view -- is to expose yourself to new ideas and perspectives. Perhaps, in the process of debate, your perspective will be widened, or challenged, or eroded, or developed. You don't need to change a person's entire worldview in the span of a dozen posts. But if you can get at least
one person to start thinking about things in a new way, whether that person be the defender or the accuser or a spectator, then good work will have been done that day.
In the end do you really think it is worth arguing about if it's okay if some boy wants to dress up in nothing but pink Hello Kitty clothing or not? It's amazing how all these "open minded" people get so butt hurt when one Christian shares his simple ignorant religious belief on the matter.
It's worth debating if we all agree that it's worth debating. We're all free citizens of the Internet, here. We can set the terms, and agree to hold to them. Much as how when playing soccer, everyone agrees to play by the rules (or else the game becomes much harder to play).
That aside, I think you are misrepresenting the issue, here. I don't care about whether a boy can wear Hello Kitty outfits. That's only relevant as a function of the broader issue. What I'm concerned about is that legally banning cross-dressing, and socially shaming or disavowing cross-dressing, both seem to be rationally unjustifiable propositions, and that do so would infringe on the autonomy of society's members. I think infringing on autonomy is an undesirable state of affairs, so I oppose such measures to inhibit the practice of cross-dressing
for those who want to do it.
What we are discussing here is a broad social issue that concerns modern attitudes on sex, gender, ethics, norms, law, and interpersonal dynamics. To reduce this topic to being just about whether a boy can wear earrings is to ignore all the things that this issue touches.
Lastly, I don't know about other people, but I'm not butthurt by your views, even though they stand in contrast to mine own. And I hope that shows in my writing. If I write and write and write, it's not out of anger, but out of a desire to minimize any possible misinterpretation or confusion in my points (and perhaps sloppiness, a flaw to which I might be willing to concede 8P).
Thanks for helping me with my philosophy paper, this trial was quite interesting nonetheless. Keep up the essays Sehnsucht I really do think your on to something. You should write a book one day; I bet it will be a best seller.
If you are writing a philosophy paper, then good luck on it.
And I do in fact have plans to become a professional novelist. Prose writing is different from technical/debate writing, but all writing makes for good writing practice. 8)
