Whacky Lawsuit Against the Church Goes Awry

[Scott Lloyd]

21 hours ago, bluebell said:

He sounds like the kind of poster where anyone who doesn't agree with him isn't sensible.    

Oh how I want to draw a comparison from a current event of this past week — but it would violate the no-politics rule. 

[bluebell]

21 hours ago, Michael Sudworth said:

I disagree with @Robert F. Smith about nearly everything.  But he is an honest, sensible intellectual.

I believe @mfbukowski pollutes the Gospel message with his Rorty fetish. But I respect the effort @mfbukowski puts into developing and expressing his arguments.

Smac is Zeezrom.  Fancy words, no substance.

Smac is probably one of the most respected posters on this board.  He is so respected because his posts add a lot of substance.  

[Robert F. Smith]

2 minutes ago, bluebell said:

Smac is probably one of the most respected posters on this board.  He is so respected because his posts add a lot of substance.  

And he avoids personal attacks.

[LoudmouthMormon]

1. "Most sensible people disagree with Smac's posts on this board."
2. I agree with many, if not most, of Smac's posts.
___________________________________________________________________
Therefore, I am not a sensible person.

 

I'd just like to go on record as having understood this argument back when I chose my username.

[ksfisher]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

The legal community has discussed the relative merits of the English Rule (loser pays both side's attorneys' fees) and the American Rule (each side pays unless there is a statute or contract that says loser pays both sides' fees).  I'm somewhat ambivalent about the debate.  I see merit to both rules, but only have practical experience with the latter.

I recall a science fiction story I read years ago, don’t remember the author, where the losing attorney was put to death.  Not saying we should try that...

[ksfisher]

22 hours ago, Michael Sudworth said:

I disagree with @Robert F. Smith about nearly everything.  But he is an honest, sensible intellectual.

I believe @mfbukowski pollutes the Gospel message with his Rorty fetish. But I respect the effort @mfbukowski puts into developing and expressing his arguments.

Smac is Zeezrom.  Fancy words, no substance.

Did you just join the thread to insult people?

[Kenngo1969]

3 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

And he avoids personal attacks.

Even when they're warranted.

[Stargazer]

3 hours ago, ksfisher said:

I recall a science fiction story I read years ago, don’t remember the author, where the losing attorney was put to death.  Not saying we should try that...

There was a Robert Heinlein novel or short story in which one of the characters mentions a historical event, when ALL the lawyers were put to death. For being lawyers, I guess.

[Stargazer]

On 5/23/2020 at 8:11 PM, mfbukowski said:

I found the church through Pragmatism, and without that basis I would find LDS beliefs absurd.  I was an atheist before I joined.

Interesting about the various paths of those of us who were "converts" found the church. I wonder though, and this is off-topic of course, but do you not think that you found the church because the Spirit led you to find it? Or was it actually all your own doing?

[Stargazer]

13 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

For the record I think that Bob is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met

I agree. Of course I sometimes disagree with him, and he with me.

I only come to this board nowadays so as to regain my humility. I sometimes think I'm pretty hot stuff intellectually, but then I come here and get jaw-droppingly awed by you, Mark, @Robert F. Smith, @smac97, @Kevin Christensen, and @Calm.  My patriarchal blessing tells me twice to be humble. My mission president, who was a patriarch, told me that things get said twice in these blessings for a reason. And I am a proud man, no question. But learning more and more that I have less reason to be so than I might think.

[Robert F. Smith]

8 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

I agree. Of course I sometimes disagree with him, and he with me.

I only come to this board nowadays so as to regain my humility. I sometimes think I'm pretty hot stuff intellectually, but then I come here and get jaw-droppingly awed by you, Mark, @Robert F. Smith, @smac97, @Kevin Christensen, and @Calm.  My patriarchal blessing tells me twice to be humble. My mission president, who was a patriarch, told me that things get said twice in these blessings for a reason. And I am a proud man, no question. But learning more and more that I have less reason to be so than I might think.

All the same, you are smart as a whip, Stargazer.

[Robert F. Smith]

28 minutes ago, Stargazer said:

There was a Robert Heinlein novel or short story in which one of the characters mentions a historical event, when ALL the lawyers were put to death. For being lawyers, I guess.

Yes, and even Jesus condemned the lawyers:  Luke 11:52 "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered."

[Stargazer]

On 5/23/2020 at 6:52 PM, Michael Sudworth said:

I am don't have the stamina to match Smac's nonsense.  He's driven many good posters away through his sophistry by simply wearing them down with Zeezrom-esque language and tricks.

Which posters has he driven away?  

Edited May 25, 2020 by Stargazer
needed to clarify

[Kenngo1969]

4 hours ago, ksfisher said:

I recall a science fiction story I read years ago, don’t remember the author, where the losing attorney was put to death.  Not saying we should try that...

Well, it would definitely cut down on frivolous lawsuits!

Quote

 

"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

—**** the Butcher, William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2

 

 

Edited May 24, 2020 by Kenngo1969

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

get jaw-droppingly awed by you, Mark, @Robert F. Smith, @smac97, @Kevin Christensen, and @Calm.

My ego likes that one.  

Edited May 24, 2020 by Calm

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Interesting about the various paths of those of us who were "converts" found the church. I wonder though, and this is off-topic of course, but do you not think that you found the church because the Spirit led you to find it? Or was it actually all your own doing?

Oh no, not for an instant, it was clearly the spirit

I grew up an altar boy and early in my life I had to choose to join or not join a Catholic seminary to become a priest or not.  Catholics pray about their "vocation"- deciding if they want to essentially follow the "religious" path,  ie: become a priest or nun, or the "secular" way of life - marriage and family.

It's a long story but I prayed about it and it was clear that I was to do both.  I was supposed to be a priest as well as have a family.  Not possible in Catholicism.

Then I hit college.  Religion was for ignorant people who were afraid to hit life head on and know there was nothing after death.  They were irrational oafs, taught the "opiate of the masses" (Karl Marx quote) who didn't know shinola......  well you get the rest.

But there was this lingering doubt within my doubt.   What did it mean to be "rational"?  Invisible beings?  There was absolutely no evidence for such nonsense.

And yet could it still be rational to be religious?  My family was well connected and I knew a lot of VERY smart people who were religious.  One of my great uncles was both a lawyer AND a doctor- fully licensed in both!  The family was full of doctors and lawyers, who remained religious.

I had a distant uncle who was even a philosophy professor who remained a Catholic!   What was HIS problem? 

I had atheist professors who were wonderful, caring compassionate people, like Angela Davis, who dedicated her life to social justice, and were atheists.

What was the problem with these smart people who actually believed in invisible beings who lived in the sky - how was that not CLEARLY mythology?

And people said that God made us and others said that we made God!   Who was right?

I was looking for the crack in the reasoning of these smart people who thought that God could be "real", while clearly they deluded!  What was their problem??

So I jumped into philosophy inquiring about philosophy and logic and what logic itself WAS.

Everybody said "be logical"! but no one said what it was that WAS logical!!  

What IS rational and not rational?

And so forward through the history of philosophy looking for that crack that could disprove atheism OR theism- it didn't much matter.

The old arguments of Augustine and Aristotle were clearly flawed with circularity.

It was like rock-climbing a wall looking for that one crack that you could stick a finger in, then pry loose a pebble that led to a rock you could pop out, big enough to create a hole big enough to stick a hand into. 

 And once you had that hand hold you were on up to the next sliver of a crack in reasoning you could poke around in to find the pebble which led to the rock, which led to the next hand hold and the next step up, 

Somewhere there had to be a hole big enough to boost you up to the perfect argument to show that one side really was "irrational" in that it contradicted itself, and the other did not.

Long story a little bit shorter, I found that crack, and surprise surprise!!   Those dang theists were right all along!!   Who woulda guessed? 

I won't go into it here obviously but the little crack was in the Kantian idea of the synthetic a priori.   Google it if you like.  Bottom line is that he saw that WE as human beings - in our minds- contributed to OUR OWN CONCEPTIONS of what "reality" IS.

Another way of saying it is that the way we see things and know what we know about the world is completely influenced NOT by what is "out in the world" but by the categories of perception within our own minds!

This leads to another crack- one in empiricism.  

Empiricism says that the way we know about the world is to study the world.  But Kant and the boys say you KANT  can't  do that, because the way your mind sees things determines every perception, so what you see is largely in your mind, and not in the world.

So if we cannot possibly perceive the "world as it is" then all we can speak about, write about, think, or know is conditioned by the way our brains work - IF that means "our minds"- another twist- then what IS real??

"Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face"

Now along comes William James with his rock-cracking bull dozer to knock the biggest hole in the wall of atheistic empiricism yet!

He brings in the idea of "RADICAL EMPIRICISM"!!   He says "if you want empiricism, I will give you a real empiricism!  If you want to know about the world you have to also know about the psychology of the observer and what that contributes to the "evidence"!!

That means that if you believe in God, that very fact contributes to the way you see the world- and it is therefore an empirical fact that at least "for you" God exists, and it is perfectly rational to believe in God

It is the other empiricists who get it wrong because they are not counting the human factor into what humans observe.

And at the same time along comes the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" which IN PHYSICS makes a huge splash.   What does it tell us? When combined with the "observer effect", in 25 words or less, it tells us that some values in physics CANNOT in principle be accurately measured- and- that nothing cannot be observed without the observer affecting the observation itself.  If your experiment wants to see light as a particle, it sees light as a particle.  If you want it to be a wave, it's a wave.

It's all human observation AS HUMANS OBSERVE

In other words "we see the world through a glass darkly" and that cannot be overcome!!

So now how do we disprove God?   We can't!   Feelings and our perceptions of reality influence everything we do and say and so we cannot know "reality as it is", but only as we see it.

In other words we have to think "Pragmatically"- we do the best we can with experimentation finding things that work and don't work

And along comes Kuhn and popularizes the idea of "Paradigms" in science- same thing.  What works rules.

And along comes Wittgenstein speaking about philosophy- that we think in "language games" and that language does not "mirror reality" at all.  Meaning depends on the context of language itself and is not linked to "the world as it is"  What works rules.

History itself cannot be said to be "empirical" anymore because it can't tell you "what really happened" either.  And besides so much of it is hearsay.  What works rules.

And morality itself works, it is what society demands to make a peaceful place to raise kids.

And so the mountain I was rock climbing on disappeared.  Crumbled to bits.  Guys like Dawkins were the ones who were uneducated, not the farmers in Utah.  They knew what works.

There was no longer any reason to think that science or ANY human inquiry could tell me about what "IS" but only what "Works as far as we can tell".  Pragmatism, not "Truth" etched in stone.  Only what works and is guaranteed to change.  

Covid is a perfect example.   We're wandering around trying various things and experimenting.

Alma 32 in action.

And why Rorty??  Because he is the only one who can put it all into a few lines, lucidly.

And then I found the church, somewhat miraculously, but that is for another day.

Phew!  If you actually read this, you can stop now. 

 

Edited May 24, 2020 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

All the same, you are smart as a whip, Stargazer.

Heck yeah, I love your posts @Stargazer

[The Nehor]

On 5/23/2020 at 12:53 PM, Michael Sudworth said:

Are you dating anyone, Nehor?  How's that going for you?

You know who I am dating.....wait....is your mom planning on breaking up with me?  

[Kenngo1969]

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

You know who I am dating.....wait....is your mom planning on breaking up with me?  

Shhhh!  It would seem, Nehor, that Mr. Sudworth is muuuuuch better at dishing it out than he is at taking it!

[Stargazer]

9 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Phew!  If you actually read this, you can stop now. 

Well, I'd have to, and I did, because that's where it ended! 🙂 

I hadn't expected such an interesting response to my very simple question! It makes me think of Rule of Acquisition #208: "Sometimes, the only thing more dangerous than a question, is an answer." I've often thought of how I would go about writing something that would cause at least least thoughtful atheists to reconsider their position. But you very clearly must write a book, that book. Seriously.

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Well, I'd have to, and I did, because that's where it ended! 🙂 

I hadn't expected such an interesting response to my very simple question! It makes me think of Rule of Acquisition #208: "Sometimes, the only thing more dangerous than a question, is an answer." I've often thought of how I would go about writing something that would cause at least least thoughtful atheists to reconsider their position. But you very clearly must write a book, that book. Seriously.

Thanks.

[Michael Sudworth]

18 hours ago, The Nehor said:

You know who I am dating.....wait....is your mom planning on breaking up with me?  

She said you are way too old for her.

[Michael Sudworth]

14 hours ago, Kenngo1969 said:

Shhhh!  It would seem, Nehor, that Mr. Sudworth is muuuuuch better at dishing it out than he is at taking it!

Sorry to disappoint you my dude. But the mods suspended me for "abuse behavior" because I pointed out that both Smac and Zeezrom share the same profession.  Oh well.  

 

[Michael Sudworth]

20 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

but no one said what it was that WAS logical

This is pure nonsense.  The field of Logic is an extremely well-defined field of philosophy and math.

20 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

What IS rational and not rational?

I think the Enlightenment provided a very good record of showing us what is rational and not rational.  Correspondence theory builds bridges.  Pragmatism makes philosophers like William James more tolerable at fancy Harvard cocktail parties.

20 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

But Kant and the boys say you KANT  can't

Absolutely false.   He made no such claims.

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

the way your mind sees things determines every perception, so what you see is largely in your mind, and not in the world.

You would do well to study up on Kant's discussion of noumenon and phenomenon. I think you would find it interesting.

21 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Covid is a perfect example.   We're wandering around trying various things and experimenting.

Alma 32 in action.

Good grief man.  Are you really trying to use Pragmatism and "language games" to support your view?  The properties of a virus are not a product of language.  Language is a symbolic representation of those properties.  Incomplete, yes.  Untrue? No.

Whether they have a name or not, red blood cells exist and do their thing. Language has absolutely nothing to do with it.  We don't work on vaccines based on "what works" in Pragmatic terms.  We study them scientificaly using the correspondence theory of truth. 

You want to have it both ways by playing these really strange rhetorical games.

 

[The Nehor]

40 minutes ago, Michael Sudworth said:

She said you are way too old for her.

Speaking as your father figure I think your futile attempts to destroy your mother’s happiness are shameful and juvenile. Expect a spanking next time you visit.