So, I'm a Buddhist now.

[Despanan]

[dexeron]

[Rip]

Aw, I got skipped :/

[Despanan]

I'll get to you Rip, I've been crazy busy since getting back in the country. My day-job is about to restart and I have two weddings to prepare for, plus art stuff and medical stuff for my fiancée and sadly, this discussion is getting to be bigger than I can give due attention to on my smartphone.

For now I'll just say to Dex there are plenty of ways to intuit a correct answer without following a specific method. I used to do it all the time in math class to the bemusement of my professors who couldn't figure out how in the hell I got the right answer and assumed I must've been cheating because I would often come to the correct answer in the "wrong" way, usually through a method they could not understand.

Read "Thinking fast and slow" and "top brain, bottom brain" for a more thorough explaination - but in essence, we as creatures take in a lot more information than we are aware of and often times reasoning get's worked out by "programs running in the background" that we are not entirely aware of - so it SEEMS that the answer has come out of thin air, but in fact it has not.

That's actually one of the annoyances I have with modern secularism - it comes bundled with a whole bunch of western ideological assumptions born out of the enlightenment, including what is in my opinion an over emphasis on the known known, to the exclusion of the unknown known.

[Despanan]

Also, you seem to assume theology has no debates and no method, that it's just a bunch of stories people invented out of thin wait based on nothing. I can tell you both as someone who makes up stories for a living and someone who has recently become involved in reading various religious texts and commentaries that this is not the case. Everything comes from somewhere, and no one comes up with a creation story out of nothing. That doesn't mean they are correct, and that doesn't mean this type of reasoning is superior, it simply means that one can still come to the correct answer through early, crude attempts.

And I didn't bring up philogisten and eugenics to prove that "science was wrong" I was pointing out the fact that you were applying exactly the same fallacies to religious thinking.

Why is science allowed to have incorrect assumptions that get disprove and replaced later, but religion not allowed to do exactly the same thing? Why can religion not evolve and change? Must it always be stuck on whatever ideas became popular in the past in order to be relevant?

The very fact that you jumped straight to those fallacies in the way you did proves your aren't listening to me, you're running at least partially on autopilot from other religious discussions you've had.

Also,the story of Death in the Upanisadsdid NOT describe creation as an explosion in the way we would be familiar with it.:)

Humans have survived on this planet in our present form for nearly 200,000 years - we've only had written history for what? 2.5%-5% of our time here, and we've only had the modern scientific method since like, I dunno 1300 AD?

Do you really think in all that time, we had no ability to understand the world around us?

[Agent]

What is the point?

[dexeron]

[Despanan]

Neither one of us is talking about the information floating in the air to be grabbed by a brain.

And no one is saying it's good method for seeking facts - Buddhism does not gain it's authority from intuiting the correct facts about how the universe was created, in fact Buddhists view the question as pointless.

My point was that you are dogmatically adhering to a very specific way of taking in and interpreting information to the exclusion of all others.

Also, your definition of the scientific method sounds a bit like how AnCaps talk about capitalism - like it's some universal thing that's always been around - it isn't and it hasn't. Empiricism only developed in the 1700's and it's actually somewhat limited now that we're realizing the cracks in human perception and how organisms that perceive reality as it is are in fact not favored by evolution.

As such empirical reasoning cannot be the only way of achieving knowledge and in fact will at one point or another fail.

[Agent]

What you are saying contradicts what the guy in the TED talk you're referencing said. He specifically said that science and technology can make up for the gaps in our perception, and that we should not rely on intuition.

You said that religious experiences have a benefit for humans, which is why we evolved to be able to have them. If that's true I don't see how that's any different from the jewel beetles mistaking bottles for other beetles. It's an evolutionary shortcut that's holding us back. I'm not accusing you of seeing gods and spririts in shiny bottles, but you can't say that faith is a replacement for our imperfect perception if it's just another type of perception that we evolved.

[Despanan]