False by Incredulity, according to atheists such as Penn Jillette

[Robert F. Smith]

45 minutes ago, pogi said:

This is avoiding the real comparison of risk I am talking about though.  You should be comparing deaths/serious injuries per capita between frivolous driving and visiting that volcano over the last 100 years.  Driving will no doubt be the greater risk by far.  If you have ever driven to dinner and a movie, then that is more foolish and risky behavior than what these people did.  More people have died simply from food borne illness eating out than from visiting this volcano.  It would be totally inappropriate to call you foolish for dying in an accident while driving to a movie.  Surely you see that.  These were human beings who probably accomplished a lot of good in their life times and had loved ones who cared for them.  Mothers and fathers, children.  This is about respecting their lives instead of mocking their last moments, especially considered how relatively safe it was.  Honestly, simply visiting New Zealand in general is more dangerous than what they did, but you probably wouldn't mock someone who was murdered, or who died from typhoid fever or dengue fever, etc. while on vacation in New Zealand.   That is just so distasteful. If I was a friend/family member, I would be so incredibility incensed at your comment.  I'm really not trying to throw you under the bus, but you keep trying to justify what you said.  A simple acknowledgement that it could have been said better would go a long way.  

I think that we should be in the business of prevention on a realistic basis, rather than speaking anecdotally.  Speaking honestly and realistically is often taken as mocking and insensitive.  It is not.

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

I can't even watch those silly shows on tv with clips of stupid people doing stupid things, and then falling or getting injured and then everyone finds if funny.   I just don't "get" it.

I just have to look away at the ignorance of the person doing it, and then find the audience reaction reprehensible and totally beyond my ability to understand- to me it is alien humor.   I think once you have faced real physical pain or been close to death yourself, your perspective changes forever.   You can face the necessity of both square on, but these things are not to be trifled with.

I used to enjoy watching mixed martial arts (MMA) competition, primarily to study the techniques used.  Can't watch it anymore, though.  The injuries are just too horrible.

[pogi]

3 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I think that we should be in the business of prevention on a realistic basis, rather than speaking anecdotally. 

I’m not sure what you are referring to from my comment.

3 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Speaking honestly and realistically is often taken as mocking and insensitive.  It is not.

It certainly can be.  Speaking truthfully and tactfully are two different things.   One can speak the truth and have zero tact or sensitivity.  I still don’t understand why you consider them foolish when compared against risk of other activities we all do regularly.

Edited December 14, 2019 by pogi

[Robert F. Smith]

7 hours ago, pogi said:

I’m not sure what you are referring to from my comment.

It certainly can be.  Speaking truthfully and tactfully are two different things.   One can speak the truth and have zero tact or sensitivity.  I still don’t understand why you consider them foolish when compared against risk of other activities we all do regularly.

You apparently disagree with me on matters of risk management, and you substitute anecdotal information for realistic statistical odds.  Seems to me that we just disagree in our respective values, pogi.  Lots of humans are extremely foolish and I see no advantage in pretending that they aren't.

[Meadowchik]

On 12/10/2019 at 3:37 AM, nuclearfuels said:

1. Not all of us (definitely me, for sure) are as morally and emotionally evolved as people like Penn Jillette. So operating in a carrot/stick framework works for people such as me. If I am honest, there is no chance I'd be living the way I am without having recieved Temple blessings and other blessings throughout my life

That is a common refrain among LDS and we could probably say, among many believers. However, I think it can be hard for a believer to imagine their brains once the belief in a religion or God is absent.  I was surprised myself. It turns out that there are many things I still care about doing or not doing, just as before, but without the cosmic judgment.

[The Nehor]

14 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You apparently disagree with me on matters of risk management, and you substitute anecdotal information for realistic statistical odds.  Seems to me that we just disagree in our respective values, pogi.  Lots of humans are extremely foolish and I see no advantage in pretending that they aren't.

I just do not see the volcano trip as that dangerous.

This is what I think of when I think foolish:

 

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, The Nehor said:

I just do not see the volcano trip as that dangerous.

This is what I think of when I think foolish:

...................................

It is a question of relative values, and people do have the right to be foolish.  My question is, Why did those tourists feel safe taking children to the volcano?  I'd say that the tour agencies and the New Zealand gov't lulled everyone into a false sense of security.  They were afraid to err on the side safety.

That Barnard College freshman no doubt felt safe so close to her campus and never imagined that three teens would be raping and stabbing her to death in the park.  Victimology tells us what are the safest modes of behavior, and we ignore the rules at our peril.

[pogi]

11 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It is a question of relative values, and people do have the right to be foolish.

It is also a question of subjective judgments, and I say they weren’t being foolish.

11 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Why did those tourists feel safe taking children to the volcano?

Speaking of relative values, they probably felt safe taking children because more people have died per capita visiting Disney Land in the last 100 years.  

Edited December 15, 2019 by pogi

[Robert F. Smith]

4 hours ago, pogi said:

It is also a question of subjective judgments, and I say they weren’t being foolish.

Speaking of relative values, they probably felt safe taking children because more people have died per capita visiting Disney Land in the last 100 years.  

False statistical comparison, pogi.  You'd need to take the actual number of visitors to Disney Land since it opened in the mid-1950s, and the amount of time they spent there, and do a comparison with the rarity of visitors to White Island.  If we increase the number of visitors to White Island to equal those who visited Disney Land, we would find many more deaths down under from a variety of causes of all kinds.  It's called "risk management," pogi.  Lack of good risk management is foolishness.

[pogi]

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

False statistical comparison, pogi.  You'd need to take the actual number of visitors to Disney Land since it opened in the mid-1950s, and the amount of time they spent there, and do a comparison with the rarity of visitors to White Island.  If we increase the number of visitors to White Island to equal those who visited Disney Land, we would find many more deaths down under from a variety of causes of all kinds.  It's called "risk management," pogi.  Lack of good risk management is foolishness.

It’s not a false statistical comparison.  You are making a false assumption about increased risk.  Statistics doesn’t work on assumptions, it works on raw numbers and data collected.  Before this incident at the volcano, there were exactly zero deaths in the last 100 years.  They report over 10,000 visitors per year (much lower than Disney Land obviously, but it doesn’t need to be the same to calculate a statistical comparison).  You can calculate a statistical comparison of deaths per 100,000 visitors or per 100,000 hours visited, to be more accurate, at each location over the last 100 years.  Risk is higher for Disney Land statistically and historically speaking.  You can’t get lower than zero.  You can assume whatever you want beyond that, but it is just an assumption not based on any reliable data.

With exactly zero deaths per 100,000 visitors or per 100,000 hours over the last 100 years, one can see why they might feel safe bringing children. 

I have visited a live volcano on my mission (Mayon volcano) and lived at its base for 6 months in Albay.  It actually erupted while I was there in 1998.  I didn’t feel any more foolish then, then I do now for living in Utah where a giant earth quake is over-due.

Edited December 15, 2019 by pogi

[mfbukowski]

46 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

"There is actually no room in Mormonism for philosophy as distinct from theology."  Thomas F. O'Dea

I guess this is a bit of a derail and maybe we should take this up off line or on a new thread- I don't know how many would be interested in the subject.

I understand what he is saying here, I think, though I have not read the book or the context, because it is a commonly found idea within Mormonism, so of course I could be wrong.  Usually this sort of statement is meant to make the point, that because we are so absorbed in scriptural interpretation, there is no room for areas like metaphysics or epistemology, because we believe in an immanent God, and because we are materialists, we leave those questions for science.

In a very real way our faith is a scientific way of looking at the world.  As materialists, other than believing that spirit matter is "more refined" than regular matter,  we adhere to whatever physicists want to teach us about matter, and have no problem with it.   We have no philosophical basis or need for the idea of "Substance" as found in the Nicene Creed for example, which through linguistic trickery can turn three persons into one, or bread into flesh.    We believe in miracles, of course but to us what we call a "miracle" is some kind of real physical event for which we do not yet have an explanation- but we will accept the explanation when it is discovered.  Radio, television, and countless other technological innovations would have been seen as "miracles" in previous centuries, but we know that they are simply possible through scientific, and not supernatural means, though they may have been interpreted that way in previous centuries.

So where does Mormonism need philosophy?

If our primary quest for knowledge is a quest for better scriptural understanding, which is written in human, natural language, wouldn't it be necessary to think about the nature of human language itself, how it "represents" or does not represent reality, what properties if any a "truthful" statement has?   Wouldn't it be important to see how semantic problems can create logical confusions over poorly-defined terms - like "substance" itself for that matter?  

https://www.britannica.com/topic/homoousios

Quote

Homoousios, in Christianity, the key term of the Christological doctrine formulated at the first ecumenical council, held at Nicaea in 325, to affirm that God the Son and God the Father are of the same substance. The First Council of Nicaea, presided over by the emperor Constantine, was convened to resolve the controversy within the church over the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. The council condemned Arianism, which taught that Christ was more than human but not fully divine. The use of homoousios (Greek: “of one substance”) in the creed produced at the council was meant to put an end to the controversy, although the influence of Arianism persisted in the church for centuries. In 381 Emperor Theodosius I summoned the second ecumenical council, the First Council of Constantinople, which developed and affirmed the earlier creed. The resulting Nicene Creed also contained the word homoousios and became the definitive statement of orthodox belief.

Look at all the confusion caused over the last 2,000 years caused over a single undefinable term!

It seems to me that in scriptural interpretation of natural languages, a strong philosophical understanding of the philosophy of language is an absolute "must".

So why the heck aren't we studying it? 

 

[CV75]

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

It seems to me that in scriptural interpretation of natural languages, a strong philosophical understanding of the philosophy of language is an absolute "must".

So why the heck aren't we studying it? 

It is too difficult to describe in simple, universally easily-digestible terms, perhaps? (the set-up...! )

I think it would help to incorporate it into teachings about the apostasy and why living prophets are needed to articulate things in the language of the day (verbal, non-verbal, other), to give it relatable context.

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, CV75 said:

It is too difficult to describe in simple, universally easily-digestible terms, perhaps? (the set-up...! )

I think it would help to incorporate it into teachings about the apostasy and why living prophets are needed to articulate things in the language of the day (verbal, non-verbal, other), to give it relatable context.

Absolutely wonderful point and excellent strategy!

[Robert F. Smith]

9 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I guess this is a bit of a derail and maybe we should take this up off line or on a new thread- I don't know how many would be interested in the subject.

I understand what he is saying here, I think, though I have not read the book or the context, because it is a commonly found idea within Mormonism, so of course I could be wrong.  Usually this sort of statement is meant to make the point, that because we are so absorbed in scriptural interpretation, there is no room for areas like metaphysics or epistemology, because we believe in an immanent God, and because we are materialists, we leave those questions for science.

....................................

Yeh, you've got it, Mark.

Thomas F. O’Dea (1915-1974), The Mormons (Univ of Chicago, 1957), 233,

Quote

Its early appeal lay in the fact that its restoration of divine revelation in the latter days answered the problems about which the older denominations could only quarrel.   Thus the church must hold to its latter-day revelations literally or lose the theological and charismatic basis of its legitimacy.  Because of the great convection on the part of Mormons that they are close to a generation especially chosen by God and that their immediate ancestors talked with God–a belief that is supplemented in our day by the supposed presence of miraculous works and prophecies–there has never arisen any distinction in Mormon thinking between the natural and the historic elements of its beliefs, on the one hand, and the supernatural and transcendent elements, on the other.  With any distinction between absolute or relative aspects ruled out, it has been impossible for a middle position to emerge between literalism and liberalism.  There is actually no room in Mormonism for philosophy as distinct from theology.
    Furthermore, the immediacy and explicitness of Mormon revelation make that theology a very literalist one.  This immediacy and explicitness and the doctrine that there is no fundamental difference between the spiritual and the material or between the temporal and the eternal leave little legitimate room in Mormon thinking for what some Mormon leaders call “the philosophies of men.”

 

Edited December 16, 2019 by Robert F. Smith