Putin planning to glue together the most powerful superpower coalition in the world

[Ramona_A_Stone]

Yeah, a search for "religion, lying and statistics" would certainly turn up those pages, unfortunately the words lie or lying are only mentioned three times in a very oblique way that neither has anything to do with your argument that 'many people lie about their beliefs', nor is anything but purely speculatory rhetoric appraising the meaning of statistics with a preconceived distinction that the nature of a person's god concept plays a role in the meaning of religion, qualifications that are nowhere to be found in the data being approached, and hardly represent 'scientific studies.'

How weak and embarassing for you.

Thus we find that the superiority of religion in demographics is little more than a sham, a semantics word-game, a Big Lie (a grievous lie repeated long enough so that it becomes accepted and widespread).

Opinion.

A vast amount of people worship, as the maxim goes, not the God of Abraham and Jacob, but rather the god of the poets and dreamers. Is this perhaps the progress done against religious influence ? And what does this indicate of the honesty of religious believers, when half of them are supposed to lie about their very beliefs ? One possibility is that they are simply not intelligent enough to be aware that they are lying. While this certainly cannot explain all cases, I will discuss a bit below about the correlation with intelligence. Whatever explanation we attribute to this datum, if all these people seriously do not believe in a personal god, lack of belief in gods must be majoritary : and it seems a distinct possibility that atheism can expand in a tremendous way by tapping this vein.

I don't even know wtf that is.

If this is what you consider science, it's no wonder your view of the world is so damned comical.

[albed]

Originally Posted by gregorio

It's not about discarding some information. It's about questioning all information and being ready to accept that most of the information you previously believed may turn out to be false or at least very unreliable at some point. Once you have seen that, you can either continue questioning what you believe to be true right now - or you can choose to continue believing.

Except for your urging, I have absolutely no reason to think that what I believe might be false. Your ego is apparently so big it wants to decide what other people think in reality as well as in hypothetical circumstances.

Originally Posted by gregorio

Did you find any of these scientific studies or do you just believe in their existence? What you actually say is that people don't really believe in God.

No, I don't actually say that but that they have motives for saying they believe in god when they don't. Don't you have any experience at all with supposedly religious people. Some go to church "religiously" (heheh) but causually break whatever commandment that tells them not to do what they want. Adultery's a big one, and theft. What gives the better insight into what they truly believe? Their rhetoric or their actions.

Originally Posted by gregorio

Independent of whether there are studies trying to prove that or not, given the role religion has played in our history and still plays, I don't find that very likely.

You're using religion as a subsitute for the individual beliefs I referred to; they're not the same.

Originally Posted by gregorio

You think, therefore you are. That is the one fundamental truth you can absolutely be sure of. What else do you know? Nothing. What you remember from your past could be fake. Maybe it was a dream. Maybe you are delusional. Maybe all your memories are the result of some sort of conditioning. What you see, what you hear, everything you perceive maybe fake too. Maybe you are under the influence of drugs.

I can picture you watching the evening news, berating the anchor with a steady stream of "How do you know that's true?" "Did you see it yourself?" "Do you have undeniable proof?" "Maybe you are delusional." Get some help.

Originally Posted by gregorio

So, what do you actually know about reality or the truth? Nothing. You can assume that what you remember was really the way you remembered it. You can assume what you see is some glimpse of reality.
But consider this, you are meeting an old friend from school, you talk about a particular event of which either of you has a slightly different memory. You have to admit that stuff like that happens occasionally, - how will you ever find out that your memory serves you right?
Given all this, do you really think, you know the truth or reality? Isn't it possible that you are wrong and I am right?

Let's check what I've learned about you first.

Originally Posted by gregorio

I will call it a lie and continue to claim there were more than 2,000 civilian deaths. That is called ignorance,...I choose to be in that state rather than being forced into that state by my lack of ability to inform myself.

Originally Posted by gregorio

I consider myself and support whatever I deem best for me. I don't believe in the greater cause.

Originally Posted by gregorio

If I choose which truth to believe, it is not a lie. I can build my own little reality just by choosing which sources are trustworthy and which are not. In this reality, everything that I say is true and everything that you say is a lie.

Originally Posted by gregorio

It's plausible, many people will believe it, ergo it's true.

And you think your explanation is more plausible than mine--did I even give one? It seems the real world really has no place at all in your explanation of it. It's all about your ego.

Originally Posted by gregorio

And I am going to tell you, you are wrong. I am right. And I'm not going to prove it to you, because I can't, as well as you can't prove the opposite. But I can argue that my explanation of the world is much more plausible than yours and therefore we should agree that it is true until somebody comes up with a better explanation.

Nah.