It has nothing to do with Western secular culture. Secularism is about the separation of church and state, a principle that is supported as passionately by religious people (excluding some of those belonging to whatever the locally dominant religion is) as by the non-religious. I guarantee you that Christians in Syria, Muslims in India and Hindus in Bangladesh would love for the culture in which they live to be much more secular than it is.it's beyond the scope of materialism. And they're actually two different things. But there are neuro-scientists, and other scientists, who are not at all materialistic in their approach, so it's not an problem of science per se, it's more an attribute of Western secular culture. — Wayfarer
It has nothing to do with Western secular culture. Secularism is about the separation of church and state, a principle that is supported as passionately by religious people (excluding some of those belonging to whatever the locally dominant religion is) as by the non-religious. — AndrewK
you just said it's 'religious bullshit' - so what's to discuss? — Wayfarer
It is having faith in the principle of induction - the belief that the future will be like the past. As Hume pointed out, there is no way to logically ground belief in that principle - one has to take it on faith.... or (we expect, based on our faith in that principle) starve.It's not having faith in something if it produces reliable results. — MonfortS26
Francis CrickThe Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
Richard DawkinsWe are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Daniel DennettLove it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
I don't have a very favorable opinion of religious belief. I see it as corrupting the minds of the youth and damaging our scientific advancement towards a better tomorrow.
I don't see any rational reason to believe anything other than what I can prove beyond reasonable doubt.
And all of that is a consequence of the development of the Christian West. I think what you would see as a consequence of putting their ideas into action, is a culture that is a lot less free, because it grants the human being no intrinsic reality. — Wayfarer
As if minds aren't being corrupted already by the free availability of online pornography and all of the nefarious activities that people get up to on the internet. you can loose your home without leaving it, gambling on the internet. — Wayfarer
There was a powerful philosophical movement called Logical Positivism which was started by a brilliant phllosopher, A J Ayer, when he was still in his twenties. He published a book called Language Truth and Logic, which argued for 'the principle of verificationism'. Very hard to summarise it, or the arguments around it, I spent a whole semester on it. But suffice to say that in the end, it had to be admitted that Ayer's principle of verificationism couldn't be justified on it's own terms. Why not? Because the statement that 'every proposition has to be verifiable with respect to some state of affairs', could not itself be verified by those means. (I'm paraphrasing here.) — Wayfarer
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