What should religion do for us today?

Nobeernolife

Natural disasters are punishment of Allah Subhanahu Wa Taala for those people who are either disbelievers or cross His limits; — Natural disasters and calamities in light of Quran and Sunnah

You trying to change the topic. The holocaust was not as "natural disaster". It was carried out by Nazis and assisted by muslims. And in the eyes of the lead Sunni cleric, it was a good thing, and he hopes that Muslims will continue it: "Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers."

So what was that again about Nazism being incompatible with islam?

alcontali

It was carried out by Nazis and assisted by muslims. — Nobeernolife

No, no. It was carried out by Nazis.

Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers. — Nobeernolife

This cleric does not seem to be familiar with the details of the Holocaust. The Nazis also mass-murdered Jewish women and children. In spite of their ahl al-kitab status, the Nazis also mass-murdered Jewish noncombatant men. Someone needs to update this cleric on these matters, because the Quran strictly forbids Muslims to participate in that kind of things.

On the other hand, the Zionist apartheidsstate of Israel will always end up at the negotiation table; if they are reasonable, in order to sign the dissolution of their apartheidsstate and to discuss the details of the successor state, or if they are unreasonable, to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender. The choice of instrument is theirs, really.

Nobeernolife

No, no. It was carried out by Nazis. — alcontali

Carried out by Nazis, applauded by muslims, and also assisted by muslims. Read up on the Nazi muslim SS troups that the Al Husseini recruited, i.e. in Yugoslavia.

And Yussuf Al-Qaradafi is not just "a" random cleric, he is the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood and massively influential in the (sunni) islamic world.

You keep evading and misleading, but I think I have made it abundantly clear why I find islam problematic

alcontali

And Yussuf Al-Qaradafi is not just "a" random cleric, he is the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood and massively influential in the (sunni) islamic world. — Nobeernolife

There is no Pope in Islam. A mufti's advisory only binds himself. What's more, I am quite sure that his views are not the consensus ("ijma") view on this matter. In fact, it is rather a matter of asking him if he really approves of forbidden behaviour. For example, ask him for a jurisprudential advisory about:

Sisak children's concentration camp officially called "Shelter for Children Refugees" was a concentration camp during World War II located in Sisak, set up by the Ustaše government of the Nazi-puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia, for Serbian, Jewish and Romani children. It was part of the Jasenovac extermination camp.[1][2] The camp's commander was Dr. Antun Najžer, a physician known as the "Croatian Mengele".[3][4] — Sisak children's concentration camp

If he writes a religious advisory approving of Sisak children's concentration camp, then I will change my mind on this issue. For the time being, however, I just think that he does not know what he is talking about.

MisterPhanax

Well, I think religion in a religious pluralism kind of goes hand in hand with a democracy. So, we have to just continue to live by the ideal. It is not like we are just stopping at secular education, but I think secular education in particular goes hand in hand with personal values and values of caring, community building and such.

Nobeernolife

There is no Pope in Islam. — alcontali

I did not say anything about a pope. Why do you keep misquoting me?
However, I am sure you know that various clerics in the islamic world carry various degrees of respect.
Al-Quaradafi has an enormous influence in Sunni islam, just like Al Sistani has in Shia islam.

If you did not know that, check it yourself.

And when Al-Quaradafi praises the Nazi holocaust and hopes that muslims will continue the good work of mass-murdering Jews, yes that DOES carry weight,

Now go on and try to change the topic again.

alcontali

I did not say anything about a pope. Why do you keep misquoting me? — Nobeernolife

That was not a quote. Where do you see quotation marks?

However, I am sure you know that various clerics in the islamic world carry various degrees of respect. Al-Quaradafi has an enormous influence in Sunni islam, just like Al Sistani has in Shia islam. If you did not know that, check it yourself. — Nobeernolife

No, no, no. As far as I am concerned, "who" exactly says something, does not matter, simply because that is the core principle of manipulation. All that matters, is that religious advisories entail syntactically from scripture. Therefore, only "how" he says it, can be of import.

I subdivide the world in two types of people:

The epistemically inept, aka, the plebs: who believe that the world consists of people whose opinion is important on the one side, and people whose opinion does not matter, on the other side.
The epistemically enlightened: who believe that there are conclusions/theorems that can be drawn from legitimate formal systems versus stupidities that emerge out of system-less bullshit.

I despise the epistemically inept. I view them with contempt only.

As I see it, there are no such religious scholars who "carry various degrees of respect". Only what they say, can "carry various degree of respect". If their advisory syntactically entails from scripture then I will carefully accept what they say. Otherwise, I won't.

You see, the epistemically inept learn to trust the voice and appearance of the newsreader on television. They pretty much automatically believe what he says.

My theory of deception says that it is the aggregate belief itself in the deceptive statement (i.e. that a=b) that fuels the growth in the total amount of deception ( (b-a)² ).

Hence, it is exactly because large numbers of epistemically-inept individuals believe that the newsreader on television is telling the truth, that he increasingly starts telling outrageous lies. If his audience were even only moderately skeptical, he would immediately start reining in his inclination to lie. In other words, it is his audience, i.e. the plebs, i.e. the populace of epistemically inept, who fuel most of the problems in the world. These people are truly despicable.

EricH

↪alcontali

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.

EricH

↪alcontali

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?

alcontali

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

I don't really do denominations.
I am probably ghair-madhhabi.

It is also beyond me why Ali would be the "friend" of Allah, as the Shia profess. I would need to read a much better explanation for that, because for the time being, I just don't geddit ...

EricH

↪alcontali

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?

alcontali

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

Most generally, merely "a source outside the system itself". Once you say "transcendental", you are already outside the system itself. What does "transcendental" even mean within a formal system?

Are you saying that the only thing keeping you from performing such acts is the moral rules of your religion? — EricH

There is no system to explain this. You may instinctively sense that it is wrong to do any of that, but that is where the explanation actually stops. Again, what does "to instinctive sense" even mean within a formal system?

We are talking about systems for which we want to mechanically verify the justification for its theorems. A machine does not instinctively sense. If we go down that route, we will never be able to achieve that goal. In that case, such project will remain stuck in its starting block.

We are aware of a lot more than we can justify. It requires discipline not to make use of that awareness or even assume its existence when programming machines, because they simply do not have that awareness.

Can you acknowledge that you do not need a transcendental source to recognize that such actions are morally wrong? — EricH

From within a formal system we know nothing about the reason why its basic rules are the way they are. If you want a computer to help you verifying the justification of a religious advisory, you cannot use any of that. You will have to stick to mechanical symbol manipulation only.

Nobeernolife

As I see it, there are no such religious scholars who "carry various degrees of respect". Only what they say, can "carry various degree of respect". If their advisory syntactically entails from scripture then I will carefully accept what they say. Otherwise, I won't. — alcontali

Well, if you want to base your argument not on any statements by clerics but solely on the literal contents of the Koran, you end up with systems like Afghanistan under the Taliban and Syria under ISIS control. That is where literal, full-bore, 100% Koranic scripture is realized.

If that is what you want.... oh, and by they way, those place are also 100% cleansed of Jews, of course.

Gregory

I talked to a Christian once who said "if you are an atheist, why not kill people". I responded "so if you lose your faith you will become a murderer?" I think this demonstrates that there can be an atheist morality.

If I am on a bus, and I stand to stretch for a moment and somebody sneaks in to steal my seat, I would say "I was there first". I have therefore appealed to a law or rule. Islam will have to demonstrate that their system truly clarifies moral issues and gives us more motivation to follow them. I've been studying various religions and so far Catholicism has the best pedigree, except that there are issues like the sedevacantist one and the impossibility of determining if any official decrees in history have truly met the standard of infallibility. So the weaknesses of all the "systems" are showing themselves to me.

I get the idea that Muslims don't get the "moral of the story" when it comes to Nietzsche's writings, and that they have experienced a Sartre moment where "people are hell". People find different things to distract themselves in those situations. Duke Ellington said the best thing in life was food!

Finally, how are we to conceptualize a God who sustains nature every moment of it's existence, yet positively wills some things and not others?

Gregory

Religions like Christianity and Islam (as opposed to Indian religions) say that God is the lord of life and can order killings. This is a confusingly dangerous doctrine, because it can be asked: "if the death penalty for murder is allowed, how can you be sure the perpetrator didn't act on God's command?" You will have to have religious people in trials who, allegedly, know God and can determine if the murder was commanded by God or not. So those religions clearly imply that religion and government should be intertwined. Then there is the problem of rulers thinking God is telling them to start a war.

So don't be scared of atheists killing people because they didn't find meaning in their lives (that would be their fault).

Nobeernolife

Islam will have to demonstrate that their system truly clarifies moral issues and gives us more motivation to follow them — Gregory

Islam does very clearly classify moral issues and does give motivation to follow (brutal punishment on on one side and 72 virgins on the other....). However, the islamic moral system is not one that correponds to modern, enlightened, compassionate ethics.

Nobeernolife

Religions like Christianity and Islam (as opposed to Indian religions) say that God is the lord of life and can order killings. — Gregory

Order killings? Are you sure of that? Afaics, Christianity includes the concept of sanctity of life. Islam, in contrast, does not.

Gregory

↪Nobeernolife

Well the old Testament has the Jews killing pregnant women by tearing out the fetus. God commanded. Christians try to cover themselves by saying Jesus changed this in the New Covenant, but it is not in the New Testament

Nobeernolife

Well the old Testament has the Jews killing pregnant women by tearing out the fetus. — Gregory

Ah, the Old Testament. But those are old Jewish stories preceding Christianity by 3000 years or so, so I never understood how that is part of "Christianity".
But I concede the point. If you want to bash the Old Testament, go ahead. I understand it is full of blood and gore.

alcontali

Well, if you want to base your argument not on any statements by clerics but solely on the literal contents of the Koran — Nobeernolife

That is not how it works either.

I base my argument in religious law solely on statements that syntactically entail from scripture (Quran+Sunnah).

These statements tend to be provided by religious scholars. In theory, everybody could provide them, but in practice the provider will, more often than not, need rigorous training in religious law as well as experience in order to discover such statements. Hence, religious scholars play an important role, but not exactly the role you think.

In other words, you have presented a false dichotomy, based on a poor and even incorrect understanding of the epistemology of religious law, and of even epistemology in general.

It would amount to saying: "In set theory (ZFC) you can base your argument on what mathematicians say or solely on the literal contents of Zermelo and Fränckel's publications on the matter." That would be your false dichotomy applied to mathematics.

It reflects your completely false belief that as soon as someone gets a degree in mathematics, he can say whatever he likes about it, because his expert opinion would be sufficient to back any of his claims in mathematics. It may work like that in the liberal arts, but it does not work like that in any serious STEM field. It also does not work like that in religious law.

Sir2u

I think that the christian religions should start using some sort of rigorously trained expert to interpret their moral code.
It is quiet clear to me that there is a gigantic misunderstanding of the ten commandments by the majority of people that do things that are bad.
We really do need an expert to explain them.

No,no, no. What am I saying, how can I be so blind.

They are written down so that everyone can read them. Why would they need to be any interpretation? Is god not wise enough to give them in clearly understandable words so that his people can understand and obey them?

Do not kill!
Does anyone need help understanding that?

The only reason I can think of that could explain the need for specialist to explain the rules is that the people do not have an education and need some one to help. NOT interpret them nor help understand their true meaning as it is written.

But are we out of the middle ages now? There are supposed to be few illiterate people left so the need for people to have holy books read to them should have and appears to have diminished. At least in some parts of the world.

Another thing that I could never understand is why people that have been promised a trip to heaven and a lot of presents when they get there would want to live outside their beloved countries and go to places where they hate the people there because of the god they worship.

Gregory

Abraham was told to kill Isaac. Sure, God prevented it at the end by an angel. But Abraham was told to form his intent to kill and attempt to carry it out, which is exactly what he did. So according to Christianity God can, hypothetically, order killings. The new Testament has much to say, but is silent on this. So we have two religions, Islam and Christianity, that have a soft underbelly compared to secularism. The latter does not have some "other person out there" who's mind we can not read who can order killings of people who are not obviously deserving of capital punishment. I asked a Christian apologist once to prove Jesus didn't command September 11. All he could say was "I don't think God would act like that". Again, you might think you can read God's mind, but your Scriptures say you cant. These religions have a dangerous thesis in their dogmas

Nobeernolife

It may work like that in the liberal arts, but it does not work like that in any serious STEM field. It also does not work like that in religious law. — alcontali

Religious ideology is not a "serious STEM field". It is mass psychology, and the masses of islamist fanatics out there in the real world do not know or care about your sophistry.

Nobeernolife

I think that the christian religions should start using some sort of rigorously trained expert to interpret their moral code — Sir2u

Christians have managed to extract an enlightened, positive ethical system out their befuddled books. As is evidenced in the real world, by the progress of christian-based societies. I think you should leave well-enough alone.

Gregory

My argument against the resurrection as historical fact: there are miracles claims in all religions. Thats what a religion is. Prophecy has to be about the unpredictable, the highly unlikely, and what was not deliberately fulfulled. The Gospels contradict each other, so we have likelihood of Chrisitians making up history 40 years after Jesus. Who knows anything about the rumors 40 years before

Nobeernolife

My argument against the resurrection as historical fact: there are miracles claims in all religions. Thats what a religion is. — Gregory

You should not generalize about "religion". There are very different ones out there.

Gregory

Even Islam says not to look to signs. A devil could have been in Jesus and caused him to appear dead

Gregory

Even quantum eraser effects verge on miracle

alcontali

Religious ideology is not a "serious STEM field". — Nobeernolife

I talk about religious law. Religion has other areas than just its law, for example, the origin of religious law.

Religious law is a formal system of morality that rests on system-wide premises, i.e. its scriptures. From these system-wide premises, we can syntactically derive theorems. It is possible to mechanically verify these syntactic entailments.

This is an example of a theorem encoded in the formal language of the Coq proof assistant:

assert Syllogism {
  all Socrates: univ, Man, Mortal: set univ |
      -- every man is mortal
      Man in Mortal
      -- Socrates is a man
      and (Socrates in Man)
      -- implies Socrates is mortal
      implies Socrates in Mortal
  }
check Syllogism

I am very interested in doing a project that consists in encoding the scriptural system-wide premises of Islamic law in the formal language of the Coq proof assistant.

Next, it should be possible to also encode the curated knowledge database of religious advisories. At that point, the curated knowledge database of religious advisory scripts will be mechanically verifiable.

That will create the field of religious script programming, i.e. the activity of re-encoding religious advisories supplied in natural-language into the formal language of the Coq proof assistant with a view on carrying out mechanical verification.

That will then be complete evidence for the fact that religious law is a STEM field.

In fact, we knew this already because all systems of formal reasoning from first principles, i.e. all axiomatic disciplines, are fundamentally STEM fields.

Gregory

What is the longest syllogism?

What should religion do for us today?

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