The Religion of Leftism

[Ry]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VDYv6zT30E" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[atlantaiconoclast]

Spot on!

[Raoul]

Great video!

In the early 90's they stood out a bit more. Now they walk among us, a bit less militant maybe but just as arrogant



If you don't support Obama's humanitarian bombing in Iraq and Syria you're a racist! and soon you'll be a sexist too when Hillary dose it lol

[Crandaddy]

Ry,

I was debating whether or not I'd just let this go like your other anti-religious rants, but I think something really needs to be said: When you go spouting off about how stupid religion is, while portraying it in the most extreme, simplistic, simple-minded, literalistic, fundamentalist terms, the only person who comes off looking stupid is you. What you're doing is a classic, textbook example of setting up and tearing down a straw man.

It really is *THE EXACT SAME THING* as someone dismissing all 9/11 conspiracy theories as tin-foil-hat-wearing craziness because believing that Bush and Cheney are really reptilian aliens who used laser beams from space to destroy the towers (as of course all 9/11 truthers do) is completely absurd! You love to cry foul when someone else volleys criticisms like this at you (and justifiably so), but then you turn right around and do the exact same thing to people you disagree with. If this isn't hypocrisy, then I don't know what is!

[Ry]

skype me Rys2sense and let's record a discussion about religion and we will see who comes off as stupid jack ass.
911 doesn't require the super natural or magic to explain it. so it is not the "EXACT SAME HING at all. In fact it is the exact opposite thing.

[Crandaddy]

Sorry it's taken so long fo me to get back to you. I've been under the weather of late, and it's hindered my productivity.

skype me Rys2sense and let's record a discussion about religion and we will see who comes off as stupid jack ass.

I would be happy to discuss religion with you, Ry, but I'd prefer we do it here in writing, rather than over Skype. For one thing, I've never used Skype before, and so it's not a communication medium I feel comfortable using. For another, I feel that written communication better enables people to follow the presented arguments and diminishes the opportunity to misrepresent opposing views (whether intentionally or not), as it eliminates the need for the interlocutors to continually repeat themselves.

However, if you want to address something I say in a future video, then go right ahead. All I ask is (1) that you represent my views fairly and accurately, and (2) that you provide a link to my own words along with the video, so that interested viewers can read what I've written for themselves.

Fair enough?

911 doesn't require the super natural or magic to explain it. so it is not the "EXACT SAME HING at all. In fact it is the exact opposite thing.

I believe you're right that it doesn't require the supernatural or magic, but you're missing my point. My point is that it's not a fair criticism of religion to say that religious people either believe (100% literally) in a bunch of superstitious fables in order to explain how the world works, or else they're a bunch of hypocrites who might as well have Mother Goose as their religious text, just as it's not fair to lump everyone who doesn't believe the official 9/11 narrative into the same group with the crazies who believe in reptilian aliens, illuminati conspiracies, and death rays from space.

Yes, there are religious people who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old and that it was once covered in a global flood, but there are many more who don't, and they're not a bunch of hypocrites. Religion is FAR more complex, nuanced, and I dare say, robustly defensible than you give it credit for.

[Ry]

No I got your point you missed mine. religions all of them require super natural beliefs. thats why they are called religions and not philosophy. theories on 911 can or can not meet the facts. An intelligence agency covertly pay hijackers to fly planes into buildings. That's physically possible to do. Reincarnation or walking on water talking donkeys the earth sitting on a giant turtle etc are not possible. It is the same level as mother goose.

[Crandaddy]

No I got your point you missed mine. religions all of them require super natural beliefs. thats why they are called religions and not philosophy. theories on 911 can or can not meet the facts. An intelligence agency covertly pay hijackers to fly planes into buildings. That's physically possible to do. Reincarnation or walking on water talking donkeys the earth sitting on a giant turtle etc are not possible. It is the same level as mother goose.

Well, you seem to consider leftism a religion, and it doesn't seem to require any beliefs that might be considered supernatural. But perhaps more important to the present discussion is that you seem to equate supernatural beliefs with superstitious explanations of the physical world that necessarily compete with the explanations that modern science provides, and furthermore, in a rather scientistic manner, you also seem to assume that materialistic, physicalistic explanations always trump other sorts of explanations. But just because a set of beliefs invokes entities or states of affairs that cannot be accounted for strictly in terms of material objects and physical laws, that does not necessarily mean that said set of beliefs illicitly encroaches on the territory of modern science, nor does it necessarily mean that said set of beliefs is false or irrational.

In fact there are many aspects of the observable, natural world that modern science can't begin to explain, even in principle. What are minds? What does it mean for a statement to be true? Do universals exist? What does it mean to assert of something that “it exists”? I could go on. If you are at all familiar with the philosophical subdiscipline of metaphysics, then you should know that non-physical entities have been routinely invoked in arguments at the highest technical level by the greatest thinkers in this field for centuries. In your video, for example, you briefly mention what seems to be a crude formulation of something like Thomas Aquinas's first cause argument, yet you seem to be completely unaware that Aquinas's “first” cause is not first in a temporal sense (i.e. as an event that occurs before other events in time), but rather it is first in an ontological sense (i.e. as something that exists more perfectly, more greatly, more absolutely than anything else, and upon which everything else depends for its existence). As a matter of fact, Aquinas explicitly argues that the world might have existed forever into the past, and it would make no difference at all to his first cause argument.

Look, you can criticize religion all you want. In fact, I believe that EVERYTHING should be critically scrutinized. Critical scrutiny is what has led me to doubt the official 9/11 narrative and certain aspects of the holocaust narrative (e.g. the soap and lampshades stories). It is precisely because I value critical scrutiny that I hate it when people make sweeping dismissals of opposing views as “stupid” or “crazy” without having properly engaged their strongest and most formidable formulations. That isn't critical scrutinizing; it's classic straw-manning.

[Raoul]

Think What We Think...Or Else: Thought Control on the American Campus