" Of course, while the rising rates of professed secularity in the Arab-Muslim world are new, the roots of such secularism run deep. Very deep. Many centuries deep. Despite the fact that many people erroneously associate Islam with nothing but religious fundamentalism, the historical fact is that skepticism, rationalism, and humanism have been long-entrenched within Arabic-Muslim history. "
​
If there was no punishment for apostasy, secularism would have taken over the Arab world by now.
4 and 16 sound like pretty sceptical authors, which might come as a surprise to those who don't know that the Arab world has (had?) a sceptical/freethinking tradition. I read about it in the fine book Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
The thesis of this book is : Don’t attack specific truth claims. Undermine faith and epistemology to create critical thinkers.
https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094/ref=nodl_
This is huge even outside of Mormonism and I whole-heartedly agree. As an Atheist myself, I've found that the best argument against any sort of religion is to deconstruct the foundation the whole thing is built on - Faith.
Giving credit where credit is due for this approach - Manual for Creating Atheists
If I may make a recommendation, read The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols. It explains why a yahoo with a computer who’s been in Florida a few days thinks he knows better than a multi billion dollar company, its suppliers and a veritable army of engineers and (actual) experts.
The degree thing is interesting... I just recently read a book (The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols; https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-Knowledge/dp/0190469412) which, among many topics, touches on the subject of how with the massive explosion of degrees and the fact that as college degrees have become more and more widespread, the value of the degrees diminishes. The author postulates that college was not necessarily meant to be the egalitarian thing that it has become and... honestly, I can't disagree with him.
And the downside of it all is that you have many who enter degree programs that are not well positioned to the modern workforce or (worse) folks who enter college when perhaps college was not the best course of action for them. We need to start encouraging more younger folks to look at the trades and other forms of employment... I think they often get overlooked and I know they were even 10 or so years ago go when I graduated high school.
Look up Peter Boghossian ~ A Manual for Creating Atheists Amazon link here. Gives a wonderful insight into how to sow seeds of doubt without causing conflict.
This feigned, arbitrary concern about sources only exists because I didn't sing the praises of your hero and makes me even less inclined to do so. He isn't an expert. Get over it.
An actual international relations professor, excerpted from their book on the subject of expertise itself:
>The expert community is full of such examples. The most famous, at least if measured by impact on the global public, is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a figure revered by millions of readers around the world. Chomsky, by some counts, is the most widely cited living American intellectual, having written a stack of books on politics and foreign policy. His post at MIT, however, was actually as a professor of linguistics. Chomsky is regarded as a pioneer, even a giant, in his own field, but he is no more an expert in foreign policy than, say, the late George Kennan was in the origins of human language. Nonetheless, he is more famous among the general public for his writings on politics than in his area of expertise; indeed, I have often encountered college students over the years who are familiar with Chomsky but who had no idea he was actually a linguistics professor. > > Like Pauling and Caldicott, however, Chomsky answered a need in the public square. Laypeople often feel at a disadvantage challenging traditional science or socially dominant ideas, and they will rally to outspoken figures whose views carry a patina of expert assurance. It might well be that doctors should look closely at the role of vitamins in the human diet. It is certain that the public should be involved in an ongoing reconsideration of the role of nuclear weapons. But a degree in chemistry or a residency in paediatrics does not make advocates of those positions more credible than any other autodidact in those esoteric subjects.
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190865970/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_WTVRY2NDDJ4ZNVEWG86H
You’re right. I’m not used to people reading my comments necessarily but it’s a good habit to get into if and when I recommend books
Edit: spelling
I can't really say because the messaging has a lot going on in them. This one has good commonality to Cbus but missed the mark on the images. The next one you posted has "GENTRIFICATION!" and the text size is dominate, are you trying to say it loudly or in a negative tone?
Book recommendation - https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287
Best I can personally recommend is Doubt: A History by Jennifer Hecht, which chronicles the history of atheism and skepticism up to the publication of the book.
Religion enables otherwise good people to feel good about doing bad things.
Highly recommend
https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094
as a way to talk with religious people.
Oh, yippie. An "open letter."
Well, here is my open response.
> Chip shortages are primarily on gpus and more computer oriented products
First off, all of Schiit's products use lots of parts that are common with computers, and more critically, mobile phones. There are a lot more mobile phones. USB and D/A converters for example.
> I don't want an assumption on inventory ... I want a solid date of when it will be shipped
So if they tell you that it will ship on or before December 2021, will that satisfy you?
There is only 1 Apple that has 100% control of their supply chain and the financial mass to keep it that way. Everyone else picks up the pieces when they can.
> start manufacturing in house
They already manufacture their products in-house. Both in California and Texas. It is a FEATURE: made in the USA with parts sourced from the global supply chain.
> Ive read somewhere that 95% of the manufacturing industries are back to normal operation
OMG! And the internet is never wrong! Here. Read this book, The Death of Expertise, and realize you are not a logistics expert.
I suggest this book, Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian, if you have not already read it. You can listen to a sample on Amazon.
Before you reject it, it is an excellent book about critical thinking (in this case about religion). There is a section about an interaction he has with a Mormon about to go on a mission. It also is about how faith is not a reliable answer for the why or how you claim to know something.
Other resources:
Have you read "A Manual for Creating Atheists"? It's really good and shows a method that is completely different from debate. The author, Peter Boghossian, illustrates why debates don't work with religious people (they don't believe based on evidence, but on faith) and shows how you can instead target the foundation of their belief and assist them in realizing that it is a flawed system for forming beliefs. The method doesn't actually require you to know anything about arguments in order to demonstrate the flaws.
Here is the link to the book on amazon.
And here is a link to a channel of a guy on youtube who puts it into practice. Have a watch of some of them and see if either party comes away frustrated or worked-up.
Causation is also a logical or mathematical concept as well as a philosophical concept. But a rather difficult one to get into seriously. https://www.amazon.com/Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl/dp/052189560X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1476454772&sr=8-1&keywords=judea+pearl+causality
Forgot about this convo until I saw this tab open. Here's a book you might like. I've had decent success with its methods.
I hope that link works, I deleted a lot of what looked like extra crap. The book is called A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian. If you really want to help people find their way out of religion, that's a good place to start.
If you just want to continue being right and feeling smug, by all means carry on. But please understand that you're actively pushing people deeper into their beliefs by treating them poorly.
More elegant but not necessarily better
It's unclear what you're after. Take for example the following position:
> There is perhaps no greater contribution one could make to contain and perhaps even cure faith than removing the exemption that prohibits classifying religious delusions as mental illness. The removal of religious exemptions from the DSM would enable academicians and clinicians to bring considerable resources to bear on the problem of treating faith, as well as on the ethical issues surrounding faith-based interventions. In the long term, once these treatments and this body of research is refined, results could then be used to inform public health policies designed to contain and ultimately eradicate faith. (A Manual for Creating Atheists, KL 3551–55)
That's from Peter Boghossian and there's a subreddit named after his stuff: r/StreetEpistemology. Do you think that should be applied to all religion? I myself think it's a bit extreme.
A rather different option is to look at those groups which greatly punish you if you decide to leave. That doesn't apply to a great swath of religion (especially in the West), but it often does apply to what many people mean when they use the word 'cult'. But this property doesn't show up anywhere in the definition of 'cult' you provided in the OP.
I personally think you need rather more interesting definitions in order to justify much of any actions. If you don't, you risk implicitly depending on what certain people associate with 'religion' or 'cult', without spelling it out.
lol I don't blame you for getting tired of seeing your beliefs get exposed and dismantled so effectively and so quickly. In all seriousness, I hope you turn yourself around. Here's a book recommendation that might help. I found a lot of value in it.
> My friend...what is a chair?
If you're interested in learning more about abstract concept formation such as understanding how we know what a "chair" is, I recommend reading this essential book on the subject: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
Right, you and I understand this, but for years vaccine has been used as the word for "thing to get so you don't get this disease, so the public at large get mixed signals because they don't care to know the difference. To the general public immunization and vaccine are synonyms.
Also, you're right in that the real problem is the death of the expert. Big recommend for this book if you're interested in the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-Knowledge/dp/0190469412
Ah yes, the classic argument from an undereducated man, "Experts don't know what they are talking about" 🤦♂️
You should read this book: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190469412/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_VQ9RJE6PHRJVRJBS1C6N
> So it’s not human consciousness that makes someone a person, it’s “having had at one point a self aware human consciousness” that makes someone a person.
I am saying that it is indeed, possession of human-level consciousness that makes one a person, but a person can fall asleep and still maintain possession of its personality. (That's why when Jack falls asleep and you wake him up, he is still Jack and not some completely different dude named Ralph.)
>When does one become self aware?
Sometime after birth, perhaps months later. At birth a newborn's consciousness is at the same level of an animal's or lower. It does not possess thoughts in anything similar to how we have words, but rather emotions.
We are subject to huge amounts of sensory perceptions as our data about the world. An animal's mind is able to separate out those sensations and make some sense of them. Infants have to do that, too, and it's their first task. Compared to an animal, a human's mind can go further and understand those sensations in much greater detail and determine entities' distinguishing characteristics, creating abstract concepts (you may have never seen a certain model of car before, but when you see it you know it's a car because it possesses the attributes that define what a car is) and later much more abstract and higher level concepts that build on lower level concepts (such as the concept of individual rights, which is extremely abstract).
If anyone reading this is seriously interested in the issue of concept formation, I recommend the book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Okay thats fair.; Exact category is often debated.
The less debated fields don't have a replication crisis per se: They have a falsifiability crisis.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-physics-lost-its-fizz/
This is a heavily researched/studied topic right now-- most experts believe the biggest factor in this is social media, which has been shown in studies to weaken democracy and make us very, very stupid.
If you're looking for an in-depth explanation, I would suggest "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols or "Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" by Johnathan Haidt. I can upload PDF versions of both, since I am sure that they are both locked behind paywalls.
Some theories are so crack-brained that they don't need counterarguments.
The best counterargument to half-baked conspiracist ranting is to read <em>The Death of Expertise</em>.
If you're here, why are your parents still alive?
It's such a basic and deliberate misunderstanding of how time works.
Monkeys are not apes, but they will just say "then how come apes are still here".
Someone who admits to being a creationist is far more likely to also be racist, deliberately ignorant, and untrustworthy. I would re-evaluate your friendship. But if you want to take the plunge and help make one less conservative Christian voter - by all means.
At the end of the day you will end up arguing about facts vs faith. Which is when you will want a copy of this: https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094/ref=asc_df_1939578094/
Another book I think is relevant on how to make ideas (bits/jokes) memorable:
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Summary of the book's 6 Principles:
Simple: Keep the message simple by highlighting only the most important key point(s).
Unexpected: Command attention and curiosity by reframing information in an unexpected way and highlighting the unknown.
Concrete: use sensory information to help your target audience remember your message.
Credible: Make messages more credible by offering away to "help people test [your] ideas for themselves."
Emotional: Frame your message to elicit emotions to make a lasting impression and spur action.
Stories: Tell a story (anecdotes) to instill an inspiring or memorable chain of events in the target audience's mind.