All of eli_jones's Comments + Replies

Because of your posting style, I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. And looking over your old posts, I don't think what you have to say is any different from gibberish. Have a nice day.

Ingenious! (Even if you haven't already succeeded in that, at least you have certainly found an incomprehensible writing style.)

Are you referring to something specific you've seen in our way of doing things, or just assuming that since we disagree with you we must be doing something wrong? If you mean evolution in a literal sense, of course, that's how evolution works - and it's a feature, not a flaw, since it allows species to avoid getting stuck in a local maximum rather than finding the best configuration for their environment. That's entirely irrelevant to the rest of your comment, though, so I expect that's not what you mean. If you're using 'evolution' to mean 'thought', please don't. It's incredibly annoying. We've actually discussed that, on more than one occasion. Theists don't have any observable advantage over non-theists on matters of chance. God doesn't rig the dice for you. In every properly-conducted study - and note that we're using the same definition of 'properly-conducted' there as we do everywhere else, and it doesn't involve looking at the results and seeing if we agree - prayer has been found to make no difference to things with objective outcomes. It does have some interesting and useful effects on emotional state, in some situations, but those can be achieved just as well through brief, secular meditation. There are significant advantages to belonging to a social group like a church, but those advantages are social, not theistic - equivalent benefits can be gained by belonging to many other kinds of social groups, if one lives in an area that's not hostile to non-theists. If one is in an area or situation that's hostile to non-theists, it may indeed be clearly better to profess belief in God, to avoid being ostracized - but that's not significant evidence that belief in God is useful outside of that kind of situation, and no evidence that God actually exists.

Nope, Islam could be true. Or Judaism, or Hinduism, or something else. That would matter a lot. If you were not a member of any religion, then by what process would you decide what to believe, such that this process's output is strongly correlated with how reality actually is?

At this point it is traditional (and sensible) to point a newcomer to the Sequences, and equally traditional (and necessary) to admit the size of the great pile of writing that one is offering, and to suggest a few especially relevant articles. The ones that seem to me most relevant to the issues you are raising are the very first sequence, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, and in particular the first two articles in that sequence: Making Beliefs Pay Rent and Belief in Belief. Or for a lighter but more time-consuming introduction to what we're all about here, Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic. How did you come here, btw?

You have not provided any arguments, aside from arguments that could support any number of other mutually-contradictory claims equally well. (e.g. the argument from faith — how do you decide what to have faith in? Answer that without assuming your conclusion to be true.)

If you were wrong about any of that, then how would you find out?

Wow.