Labour's smoking ban killed the British pub

[SpontaneousOrder]

And another from my buddy John Galt (as we're already down this rabbit hole):

Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

[d000hg]

Dude... are you serious? or just a trolling genius?

"faith" by definition is the wilful ignorance of reason.

Um, no. You said that attempting to reason with someone who had faith was a waste of time. Since many great thinkers have had faith, you're demonstrably wrong.

The whole point of the catholic (for example - i don't know as much about other christian variations) 'faith' is that there is no evidence; one has to have faith, and not reason

Sorry but if you believe there is no evidence, you're mistaken (whether you think it proves anything is another matter).
If you believe the entire point is that there isn't evidence, then I suspect you've taken as gospel (!) what you were told on the subject by someone else without checking. Atheists love to make big statements about "what religion is" or "what Jesus said" and spoken with enough confidence, people take this on-board without contention especially if it agrees with what they believe.

I don't really feel the need to have another "does religion make sense" debate here though. We've done that, and it's been discussed probably a million times a day for the last century at a contemporary level alone.

Buy a book.

[SpontaneousOrder]

You said that attempting to reason with someone who had faith was a waste of time.

No, I didn't.

[darmstadt]

Some slight anti-capitalistic tones in that site (i may be mistaken), but as you brought it up -

- Voltaire

Nah, one for the Mail readers here:

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. - Noam Chomsky

[d000hg]

Is Doogie howser in the god squad? If i'd known I would;t have bothered attempting to employ reason.

Um, no. You said that attempting to reason with someone who had faith was a waste of time

No, I didn't.

You specifically said if I was a religious person that would automatically mean trying to use reason would be pointless. So, yes you did.

Also, if you never noticed my avatar or the fact I consistently talk about this stuff, or that others bring it up fairly regularly, you're not really sharp enough to be tackling the great philosophical questions of the universe.

[Gittins Gal]

Crikey, didn't somebody accuse me of going off on a tangent of a very tangential argument or something earlier?

I'm neither an atheist nor religious so yet again I find myself neither at one end nor the other of this argument, though as somebody who was (and occasionally still is) a dabbler in the occult I strongly believe in forces that can be harnessed for purposes both good and evil.

What these are, whether they are supernatural, elemental or whatever, I do not know but I've certainly experienced things that can't be explained rationally.

But this in no way leads me to judge anyone else because, in fact, there is no morality attached to anything in which I believe. If I don't like somebody, I just go up to my room, make a little dolly and stick needles in it!

[SpontaneousOrder]

You specifically said if I was a religious person that would automatically mean trying to use reason would be pointless. So, yes you did.

Where?

Also, if you never noticed my avatar or the fact I consistently talk about this stuff, or that others bring it up fairly regularly, you're not really sharp enough to be tackling the great philosophical questions of the universe.

I'm not sharp enough because I never realised that your threads were seminal works of genius, and as such I should have been aware that they're required philosophy 101 reading? I called you 'doogie howser' because I couldn't remember your username :roll eyes:

If you're gonna have a dig at someone at least read it out in your head first to check it's not pure unadulterated lameness before you press submit.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Crikey, didn't somebody accuse me of going off on a tangent of a very tangential argument or something earlier?

I'm neither an atheist nor religious so yet again I find myself neither at one end nor the other of this argument, though as somebody who was (and occasionally still is) a dabbler in the occult I strongly believe in forces that can be harnessed for purposes both good and evil.

What these are, whether they are supernatural, elemental or whatever, I do not know but I've certainly experienced things that can't be explained rationally.

But this in no way leads me to judge anyone else because, in fact, there is no morality attached to anything in which I believe. If I don't like somebody, I just go up to my room, make a little dolly and stick needles in it!

Ok. You're definitely trolling now :P

[Mich the Tester]

Bloody hell folks.

[d000hg]

Bloody hell folks.

We've done quite well. We've gone from the impact of the smoking ban on pubs, via a brief diversion into the erosion of civil liberties that is making fat people pay for two seats and a further diversion about why people are fat, into the general discussion on the tension between the government protecting people and people not liking being protected if they think they know best, via another discussion on whether people CAN make these decisions for themselves, into a brief comedy interlude about violence being the ultimate deterrent, before seguing into the nature of faith itself.

There may be more twists I miss since I'm working from memory, and probably there's a whole side-thread of MUN attacking me for being a homophobic hypocrite throughout which I haven't seen, but overally I think we've covered everything now.

It's like a microcosm of CUK except nobody mentioned house prices or fit birds (yet).