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“Santa survey” shows children stop believing in Father Christmas at age eight

#21
Syne Offline
(Dec 21, 2018 11:06 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Dec 21, 2018 09:14 PM)Syne Wrote:
Syne Wrote:I have tested what I accept to my own satisfaction.

Yep, that’s something that you’ve been pretty tight lipped about. Care to elaborate?
Syne Wrote:Elaborate on something I've developed over thousands of small steps throughout my life? Maybe, if I ever write my autobiography.
Until then, I can only answer specific questions. Have any?

I guess my biggest question is why? Knowing what you know, why do you still feel the need to go beyond naturalism with a transcendent, individualized reality (a god of some sort)? Why hold on to a metaphysical claim? How can you even test something like that? Why do you feel the need to have an idealistic view of things as they actually exist? Isn’t this enough for you? Like Rodolfo R. Llinás asked, "What more could you possibly ask for?"

"Individualized reality"? I'm not sure how anything I believe makes it individualized, other than the individual nature of everyone's own subjective experience.

Naturalism, in the form of scientism, makes many pretenses to explaining, now or in the speculated future, everything, but that's not demonstrably true, nor even hypothetically true without a great many presumptions that usually commit a reductive fallacy. It's actually the view that everything can be reduced to the material, in a wholly comprehensible manner, that is the idealistic view. My view is that humans are not inherently good. Is that idealistic? Is it idealistic to agree with the conservation of energy, that nothing is ever truly destroyed?

I'm not asking for anything. I'm taking the world at face value, without pinning faith on science any more than religion. It's clear that the two do not cover the same domain, just as there's a clear distinction between the hard and soft sciences. And it's just a question of which you think is necessary to the other. Either you think material reality is sufficient to explain everything, including belief, or you think the metaphysical, which undergirds all logic and math, plays a fundamental role in reality. Things either "just are" and it's a complete fluke that we can understand them at all, or there's an underlying logic that accounts for the consistency of things like the laws of physics.

The world tests itself, if you ask the right questions without too many presumptions.

But again, I don't expect any of that to be compelling...and I'm fine with that. OTHO, you seem to believe that your idealistic view is compelling and seem to fret over why others don't accept it, maybe without it dawning that it may be the view, not others, at fault. Either way, I do appreciate you challenging my views, expressly because they are not inherently compelling. As much as we may wish for compelling answers, how boring would such a world be?
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#22
Secular Sanity Offline
You know as well as I do that you’re just describing the god of the gaps. I think things "just are".

Syne Wrote:OTHO, you seem to believe that your idealistic view is compelling and seem to fret over why others don't accept it, maybe without it dawning that it may be the view, not others, at fault.

No. I know how hard it is to accept. I think I’m fretting more over the coincidences. If it was just one or two, I could easily dismiss them as flukes, but it wasn’t, and try as I may, I can’t explain them away.

Syne Wrote:As much as we may wish for compelling answers, how boring would such a world be?

Yeah, true.

Thanks, Syne!
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#23
Syne Offline
(Dec 22, 2018 01:15 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: You know as well as I do that you’re just describing the god of the gaps. I think things "just are".
No, the belief that there are, or will eventually be, no gaps is the idealistic faith in scientism. How can it not be idealistic to think one kind of knowledge can encompass everything.
Acknowledging that there is a domain outside of science is pragmatic. It doesn't even necessarily involve any god at all. Just accepting that some things are forever beyond science as a matter of their inherent, irreducible, and nonquantitative natures.
Quote:
Syne Wrote:OTHO, you seem to believe that your idealistic view is compelling and seem to fret over why others don't accept it, maybe without it dawning that it may be the view, not others, at fault.

No. I know how hard it is to accept. I think I’m fretting more over the coincidences. If it was just one or two, I could easily dismiss them as flukes, but it wasn’t, and try as I may, I can’t explain them away.
Well unless you want to get specific, I don't think I can help you. If you see connections you perceive as coincidence, that may be straining at a cognitive dissonance. I don't know.
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#24
Secular Sanity Offline
(Dec 20, 2018 02:55 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I hope he is. I hope that he’s my biological father. He was a great dad.
To be continued after the holidays…

I got my test results back. He was my biological father.

I’m from Clan Lennox.

I got a message from a third cousin. He's sending me a picture of my great grandparents and my grandfather as a child. It's been really interesting to say the least.

All's well that ends well, eh?  Big Grin
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#25
Syne Offline
(Dec 20, 2018 02:55 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Two years after my father passed away, a woman contacted me and said that she was my sister. Her mother was one of my father’s ex-girlfriends. So, for the last twenty years, we’ve thought that we were related. She called me about month ago. She did a DNA test and found her real biological father. She’s not my sister.

I was combing through the Black Friday ads and noticed that the kits were on sale for half the price. I ordered two of them. I was joking with my mother. I told her that I ordered them and asked if she had anything she wanted to tell me. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Ha-ha…not! She did. She said that her and my father weren’t married when she got pregnant with me. She was married to a man that drank a lot. They split up and he moved to Oklahoma. She started sleeping with my so-called my father, but her first husband came back to town for a visit, and they had sex around the same time. WTF?

My brother is a year younger than me. I asked about him. She said that her and my father were just dating, and one night at a party, my father went off with one of her friends. She was pissed and so she slept with another guy. Small farming community. Video games weren't invented yet. Not much to do, I suppose. Dodgy

I was blown away. I have a cousin on my father’s side that looks like my twin. We’re really close. I called her and when she answered she said, "Hey, Cuz!" I started crying when she said that and then told her the whole story. Her parents recently passed away but she said that all of them have taken the tests. She sent off her parents DNA a month before her mother died. So, I should be able to find out if he is my father. 

My brother has really high standards. When it comes to morals, he’s like Syne on steroids. My mother asked me not to tell him. I didn’t make any promises. I called him and told him about what she said about me. He gave me this big lecture about how it’s always better to deal with the truth. "The truth will set you free," he said. I asked, if it was him, would he want to know? "Absolutely," he said. So, I told him. He freaked out. His tune completely changed when he found out that he was in the same boat. He was pissed, really pissed. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t even want to talk about it.

I did some research and the other guy is dead. He’s buried in a little town called Bunch, Oklahoma. I should be getting the results any day now. My father never knew that she slept with anyone else. He was my rock. My mother, not so much. She said that the only reason that he married her was because he loved me, and because of that, she’s always resented me. Yeah, this Christmas is going to be really awkward.

I must have not paid attention to this "spoiler" at the time. It explains SO much.
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#26
Secular Sanity Offline
(Feb 16, 2019 08:12 PM)Syne Wrote: I must have not paid attention to this "spoiler" at the time. It explains SO much.

Fuck off, Syne!
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#27
Syne Offline
(Feb 16, 2019 08:30 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Feb 16, 2019 08:12 PM)Syne Wrote: I must have not paid attention to this "spoiler" at the time. It explains SO much.

Fuck off, Syne!

Yep, explains a lot.
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