voting for someone tautologically implies support — StreetlightX

We are all responsible for the reasonably predictable consequences of our actions. We can predict with reasonable certainty that a second Trump term will be a catastrophe for the US and the larger world. With Biden, at least there is a chance of improvement.

In a perfect world we would not have to choose between two deeply flawed candidates, but - as the saying goes - we need to accept that there are things we cannot change. I wish that the Democratic Party had found a better candidate, but if it comes down to Biden vs. Trump, I will hold my nose and vote for Biden.

That said, even if we go with your notion that voting for someone tautologically implies support, there are varying levels and degrees of support. You can like certain things about a candidate and dislike others.

If you would otherwise vote Democrat but are staying at home or voting 3rd party because of your dislike of Biden, then you are tautologically casting a vote for Trump.

Ah. Got it.

So now I’m getting ready to petition that the 2nd amendment get replaced with something that actually makes sense, hence, I’m giving people who are concerned with the issue a chance to say what they would like it to be instead. — ernestm

You're thinking too small. I suggest a petition to put all bad people in jail until they become nice.

The Antichrist is a fictional character - so that is not on my list of concerns. :smile: I'm also not concerned if he turned out to be an alien, lizard person, or member of the Illuminati.

I'm not following your response. Perhaps you missed my previous posts where I made it clear that I will vote for Biden over Trump no matter what.

Shouldn't you also trust the devil you know at this point? — boethius

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO — Frank Apisa

etc etc

Well Frank seems to disagree with you, but in this case I already know both the devils very well :smile:

Pathetic. — StreetlightX

I agree. It is pathetic that I have to make this choice. A second Trump term will be a catastrophe for the US & the world. I would vote for a trained seal over Trump - provided that the trainer was a Democrat. I wish the dems could find a better candidate than Biden.

If Biden were to shoot someone on 5th Avenue I would loudly call for him to withdraw from the race. But if he is the candidate, I have no choice but to vote for him.

I'm not happy about it, but Biden is clearly the lesser of two evils.

I'll go one step further - I'll vote for Biden over Trump even if Biden were to shoot someone on 5th Avenue.

The difference between me and the Trump supporters is that I would not glorify Biden and ignore his flaws.

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me." — Wheatley

I guess it's OK if the other gods are behind him. :smile:

Here's what some physicists are saying

I won't pretend that I understand all of this

Banned alcontali for religiously-inspired extremism. — Baden

I was wondering why I hadn't seen him recently. It's too bad - I was having some interesting exchanges with him. He had a unique point of view - sort of an Islamic Chomsky-ite. And very knowledgeable about math.

Edit added: I'm not criticizing your decision.

Define "god" first, then I can try to answer. — Nobeernolife

Have you looked into Ignoticism? That seems closer to what you are saying that atheism.

For example, the religious community has its own marriage and divorce laws. We will not consider whatsoever to ever adopt someone else's views on these matters. — alcontali

While there are a few edge cases where religious beliefs can be factored into a decision, here in the US secular law has precedence over religious law.

I didn't see a definitive answer to either of my comments/questions.
1 - System must be open source'd
2 - At a minimum, this system would have to allow for different branches of Islam.

As I said previously, and for what it's worth, I encourage you start this project of mapping the Quran into a formal language such as Coq. A couple of things :

Open Source
As you have noted, this is a massive project beyond any one person's capabilities. This wold have to be a cooperative effort.
Must be open to all religions
Even if you were to limit this to Islam, you would still have to allow for the different branches/traditions of Islam to translate those theorems specific to their choices of Hadith & Sunna. Compared to the task of converting the religious text into formal syntax (and speaking as someone who has worked with relational databases) this is trivially easy - just add a few high level keys to the database. And once you have done this, any religion could make the attempt to formalize their religious texts.

This would be very cool. And if - as you believe - the other religions are unable to formalize their religious texts, this would prove how superior Islam is to other religions. Yes/no?

BTW - just to be clear - I most emphatically am not volunteering to assist you in this. . . .

So you would be mapping the text of the Quran into a set of symbols with no semantic content?

OK. We are saying that in some sense Islamic law is a formal system. However, I think you would agree that it is not a formal system in the same sense as in math. I did a quick search and pulled out this from a different thread:

Mathematics is pure symbol manipulation, i.e. language expressions. It does not take any sensory input. Therefore, it is pure reason. — alcontali

This seems accurate to me. So when we say that Islamic law is a formal system it seems to me that we are making an analogy: Islamic law mirrors some /many of the attributes/behavior/qualities of a formal system. Your thoughts?

My responses are likely to be slow in coming - real life is taking up most of my time these days. I can maybe squeeze in a half hour here or there.

A formal system is a list of axioms.
Such formal system is always augmented with a choice of logic system, which is by default first-order logic. — alcontali

I could quibble with you over the definition of a formal system. Is a list of axioms by itself without a mechanism to generate theorems a formal system? I'm not qualified to answer that question, but if I had to maker a guess I'd say no.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to attempt to work within your definitional framework. Let me echo back in my own words what I think you are saying:

1) The Quran contains the axioms of Islam. These are transcendental in origin (your words) and not subject to question or dispute.
2) The Sunnah contains the theorems. These theorems are derived from the Quran, but they also rely on the Hadith for supporting evidence.
3) Finally, there is Fiqh which - quoting WIkipedia - "is human understanding of the divine Islamic law as revealed in the Quran and the Sunnah". So this is sort of the day to day interpretation of the Sunnah when the need arises to handle situations that cannot be easily decided by the Quran or the Sunnah.

There are multiple versions of both the Hadith & Sunnah and different denominations of Islam use certain versions and not others. Regarding the Fiqh (and again according the Wikipedia) there are "four prominent schools (madh'hab) of fiqh within Sunni practice, plus two (or three) within Shi'a practice."

I know you are deeply suspicious of organized schools of thought (since they typically become politicized) and consider yourself to be ghair-madhhabi - so no need to re-state that :smile: .

At this point in the conversation I just need to know if my understanding is reasonably close for an outside observer.

I may be misunderstanding you (or there may simply be gaps in my knowledge of Islam), but from where I'm sitting there seems to be a contradiction in your writing.

Here's what you said in a response to @Nobeernolife:

You see, Islamic law is a complete formal system with rules concerning morality. — alcontali

However, in your last reply to me, you stated that the Quran - and presumably all the laws therein - consists only of axioms. I think you would agree with me that a list of axioms does not constitute a formal system.

Are there an additional set of laws in Islam that are derived from the Quran? Perhaps analogous to the Talmud?

Sorry - I wasn't clear. What I'm looking for is some axioms of Islam.

OK, fair enough. Can you give me a few axioms - in plain language if possible? :smile:

If there is a more comprehensive list available - again with plain language explanations if available - you can give me a link to check out.

mathematics is an exercise of the human intuition, not a game played with meaningless symbols. — Intuitionism in the ontology of mathematics

According to Islamic theology, human beings are born with an innate inclination of tawhid (Oneness). — Fitrah in the ontology of Islam — alcontali

Belated response here. I think I'm following this - Fitrah is an axiom.

So next question. How do we go from this axiom all the way to the numerous laws that regulate our behavior to one another? I understand how this works in math. How does it work in Islam? E.g., how does Islam derive the laws governing marital relations from Fitrah? Are there extra axioms and/or steps involved?

Once you say "transcendental", you are already outside the system itself. What does "transcendental" even mean within a formal system? — alcontali

I am trying to express myself - as much as possible - within your framework. Here is what you said a while back:

Religion also proclaims the transcendental origin of this system of rules, necessarily from outside its formal system of rules. — alcontali

I take this to mean that there are axioms outside the formal system of Islamic Law upon which the laws are based - and that these axioms come from Allah. Am I getting this correct - or am I at least close?

BTW - in your response it's not necessary to cite any scripture - I'm a plain language person - I trust that your explanations are correct. :smile:

I have been properly chastised. I will do my best to avoid such mistakes moving forward.

I've been seeing a bunch of insults, so I cut and pasted all the names from the last few days. Apologies if I tarred you with a broad brush. :smile:

@Artemis @Gregory @Nobeernolife @Sir2u @alcontali
I should be used to it by now, but I continue to be dismayed at the level of personal invective in these conversations. There are no stupid people out here. Please criticize the ideas, not the person

Thread #3
You have expressed very consistently the need for a formal set of rules that are inspired by a transcendental source outside the system itself.

Are you saying that there is nothing inherently wrong with killing your neighbor, raping his wife, and kidnapping his children? Are you saying that the only thing keeping you from performing such acts is the moral rules of your religion? I hope not. Can you acknowledge that you do not need a transcendental source to recognize that such actions are morally wrong?

Thread #2 - Rules are interpreted by human beings
And now I'm going to contradict my previous Thread #1. There's no point in trying to come up with a common set of moral rules - because people can and do interpret the same written rule to have different meanings. Take Islam. There is only one set of written rules, yet people have been fighting and killing each other for over a thousand years over the correct interpretation of those rules. Most recently we have seen a particular sect - ISIL - commit unspeakable acts of violence against innocent people.

I am not asking you to defend ISIL. I understand that you are justifiably very suspicious of hierarchies, but even if the different branches of Islam did not fight and kill each other, you cannot deny the fact that human beings are going to look at the same written moral rule and interpret it differently - which leads to different actions in the real world.

Just out of curiosity - and in an effort to understand you better - do you consider yourself Sunni, Shiite, other?

It's fascinating to me how differently we think. Every time I ask you a question, your answer(s) seem to go off in an entirely different direction than I was thinking. Not a criticism. just an observation. Anyway, there are many different ways of responding to you - so as an experiment? Rather than clump all the responses together, I'm going to try to split these out into different threads. There is a risk in this approach in that the different reads may get mixed up - there will be some overlap between them, but this is an experiment. :smile:

Thread #1 - Get a common set of rules

Now if the leaders of all the religions of the world could get together and come up with a set of rules of morality that they could agree upon? — EricH
That sounds too much like an attempt to do design by committee. — alcontali

Well no, we're not coming up with new rules, we're only coming up with commonalities. As you say:

Religions all have the same function and therefore are more similar than different. It's like with competing brands of cars. No matter who builds the car, it still has to do approximately the same things as any other car. So, the similarities will always be more striking than the differences. — alcontali

Here's a task that would be well suited to a person of your capabilities. Figure our how to map moral rules into the Coq Proof Assistant - start an open source project and allow people of all faiths to enter their moral rules into the database and look for intersections. So in the simplest situation, religion X may have moral rules {a, b, c, d} while religion Y has moral rules {d, e, f} - so there is a common moral rule "d".

Of course it's much more complicated than that. Religions A-Y could have a common rule q that you must do something but religion Z forbids it. Do we not allow q? Maybe religion Z only has a few thousand adherents so it's OK. You could build into your system criteria so individuals could widen or narrow the commonality.

An even more serious difficulty? How do we know if two rules from different religions are the same - seeing as they are likely worded differently? Not an easy question to answer - you might need some sort of voting capability built into the project.

If you could pull this off, it would be very cool.

NP. Out of curiosity I checked it out. On first glance I couldn't tell if it was a satire site or genuine. But his books are on sale at Amazon and have verified buyer reviews. So if it's a hoax, it's pretty elaborate.:smile:

Thank you for that link. That was a brilliant explanation.

I am not interested in violating the Church's intellectual property by abusing it for unlicensed purposes. — alcontali

I was going to continue along the main line of this discussion, bu your take on this is fascinating - I've never heard this line of reasoning before. I know there's no chance of dissuading you, but let me point out a few problems with this position. I hope you will at least consider them before rejecting them.

Copyright Illegally Obtained.
There was no notion of copyright back then, the Gospels were in the public domain. Peter had no authority to claim them - basically he took them by force.
Copyright Is Long Since Expired.
I think this speaks for itself.
Copyright Only Applies to New Testament
Even if we accept the notion that the Roman Catholic Church somehow "owns" the bible, it is clear that such ownership only applies to the New Testament. If anyone owns the Old Testament it's the Jews - and to the best of my knowledge they never transferred ownership over to the Roman Catholic Church.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I will be forgiven if I refuse to use the Bible as the foundation for a formal system of morality. — alcontali

Now back to the main line of this thread. I am on your side with this one but for very different reasons. I will not use any religious text as the foundation for a system of morality, since - as you eloquently put it

Religion also proclaims the transcendental origin of this system of rules, necessarily from outside its formal system of rules. — alcontali

Now we only know each other through our writings, so I hope this does not come across as critical - I'm going to ask you to do something that may be hard for you. I would like you to put yourself in the position of a person who has no religion - but is sincerely trying to evaluate them as objectively as possible. . .
There are countless religions on this planet - new ones keep popping into existence as we speak. They all claim to have transcendental origins - but they all make differing claims. Even if you accept the possibility of a transcendent origin there is no way to evaluate the correctness of such claims. And on top of that - each religion has it's own system of moral rules and these rules differ wildly among religions. Things which are permitted in one religion are forbidden in another. And on top of that, many (not all) religions have a long and well documented history of trying to force their beliefs on other people under penalty of death.

Now if the leaders of all the religions of the world could get together and come up with a set of rules of morality that they could agree upon? I would give this serious consideration. But until that time, I reject religion as a source of morality.

So the obvious next question is how can we construct a system of morality in the absence of transcendental authority. I confess - I do not have a definitive answer to this question. The best I can say is that It is up to us frail, flawed human beings to muddle through - to continue to talk to each other and try to figure out a path.

I would add (and yes, this likely sounds like a random thought coming out of nowhere) it is vitally important that we can laugh at ourselves.

I can't comment any more on the Catholic thing. To my ears what you're saying sounds a bit conspiracy minded. But what do I know? I can't dismiss your arguments.

Other than that it sounds like you've been reading Chomsky. Much of what you say about corporate control of the legal system is - if not totally accurate - then at least in the right ballpark. The problem is that if you are living in the USA? Unless you are living off the grid on a commune somewhere, you are inside the system. You have no choice in the matter. Each of us has to figure out how (s)he can best live inside this system and still be a good, decent person. It isn't that hard - at least in principal.

I could be wrong (it happens on a regular basis) but I believe that - according to the rules you follow - my conduct towards my fellow human beings permits me to enter your Paradise.

Meanwhile, I don't feel like you have addressed my major point. Here's what you said:

By choosing a religion, you are choosing a system of rules that specifies what behaviour is right and wrong. — alcontali

And here's my response - I've bold-faced the key points:

This is one of the reasons I responded to you in the first place. Religions are far more that simply a system of rules. I wish I were a more eloquent person - I'm sure there are better ways of expressing this next thought:

There are "features" unique to each religion which drives their particular set of rules - and there are major areas on the metaphorical Venn Diagram of the set of all features of all religions where there is no overlap between 2 or more religions.

This lack of overlap is the source of a significant portion of conflict in our world today.

BTW - I admire your knowledge of math theory, I wish I could understand it at your level. Please treat this as a metaphor. :smile: — EricH

This discussion is going in many different directions simultaneously. That's not a criticism at all - you are giving some fascinating historical details. So I'm going to first address two of the items that I consider secondary to the main line of (what I consider to be) the central topic of this discussion.

Catholic Church is Somehow Hiding the Rules
I have been good friends with Catholics both growing up and as an adult - and that is not my perception. As far as I can tell, there are no secret rules for Catholics. For centuries they were not supposed to eat meat on Friday. Then, in 1966 the rules changed - but they were publicly announced by National Conference of Catholic Bishops (I'm over-simplifying this for brevity) . Now it may be that the process of deciding the rules was hidden, but to the best of my knowledge no practicing Catholic has ever been punished or criticized for violating a hidden rule.

you are not going to burn in hell merely for guessing it wrong. — alcontali

We seem to be looping around in this particular thread of the discussion. Even tho I have zero belief in an afterlife, it pleases me to hear religious people say this. It tells me that I am dealing with a reasonable person - albeit one who has some beliefs that I find very strange :smile: But I'll try one more time. IF the statement I quoted above is correct then I should have a very pleasant afterlife.

But "IF" The Southern Baptists of from the southern part of the USA are correct, then both of us will spend a long time suffering together. If anything, they would likely rate this as a very suitable punishment for our sins. . . .

By choosing a religion, you are choosing a system of rules that specifies what behaviour is right and wrong. — alcontali

This is one of the reasons I responded to you in the first place. Religions are far more that simply a system of rules. Our legal system - while not perfect - provides an excellent road map on how to live a good decent life. If I obey the laws of the USA & my state & municipality, I'm pretty much there.

I wish I were a more eloquent person - I'm sure there are better ways of expressing this next thought:

There are "features" unique to each religion which drives their particular set of rules - and there are major areas on the metaphorical Venn Diagram of the set of all features of all religions where there is no overlap between 2 or more religions. This lack of overlap is the source of a significant portion of conflict in our world today.

BTW - I admire your knowledge of math theory, I wish I could understand it at your level. Please treat this as a metaphor. :smile:

Before going on in this discussion I should be clear - I have no religious beliefs and as such do not belief in any afterlife. That said, I am good friends with people of differing religions and I see first hand that it provides a source of comfort to them. I have no problem with people being religious as long as they do not try to impose their beliefs on me. If a person's religion provides them with meaning and structure to their lives, then who am I to tell them differently?

So getting back to my first question. Put yourself in the position of a person who feels the need to belong to a religion but is not sure about which religion to join. Each religion says different things about the nature of the afterlife and how you should behave in this life. Some religions say that as long as you are a good decent person you will get into paradise. Other religions - e.g. some fundamentalist Christian denominations - say that if you do not believe properly you will burn in hellfire for all eternity.

So how is a person to choose one out of this bewildering variety of options? Remember, only one can be completely correct - and if you choose wrong you could burn in hell for all eternity. That's a pretty serious penalty for guessing wrong.

OK - so a person can live an exemplary life as a non-believer and get into Paradise. But if you accept the faith but then later in life choose another religion, then you are denied Paradise even if you have otherwise lived an exemplary life. Correct?

BTW - it's not necessary to cite any verses. I have no reason to doubt your honesty or accuracy.

It is silly to believe that religious affiliation on earth will be the only thing that will matter on That Day. Absolutely nobody seems to believe that. — alcontali

But if any one follows any religion other than Islam after Mohammed (pbuh) became the prophet then no chance to go to heaven as stated clearly in Quran: وَمَن يَبْتَغِ غَيْرَ الإِسْلامِ دِينًا فَلَن يُقْبَلَ مِنْهُ وَهُوَ فِي الآخِرَةِ مِنَ الْخَاسِرِينَ And whoever desires other than Islam as religion - never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers. [Quran 3:85] — islam.stackexchange.com

You seem to be contradicting yourself.

I have many questions each of which will open up different avenues of discussion. Let me start here:

If I follow you, anyone can get into Paradise - Christian, Jew, Atheist, etc - as long as they behave decently and avoid major sins. Correct?

Yes, certainly. It is your choice. — alcontali

One problem I'm having with this statement is that different religions make different claims about what happens to me after I die and there's no way that they can all be correct - at most only one religion is correct and all the others are wrong to some degree.

If I guess wrong and choose the wrong religion, then after I die? Really, really bad stuff will happen to me. Depending on which religion is actually the true correct religion my eternal soul will burn in hellfire for all eternity - OR - maybe I'll suffer in purgatory from some period of time - OR - maybe I'll be re-incarnated as a cockroach.

This is bad enough for me - but if my children choose the same religion (as is most typical) then the same terrible fate will befall them as well.

Can I choose any religion for me & my children?