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According the Beeb (BBC):
At least 137 people have been killed and hundreds more injured in explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, police and hospital sources say.
At least eight blasts were reported. Three churches in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo's Kochchikade district were targeted during Easter services.
The Shangri-La, Kingsbury, Cinnamon Grand and a fourth hotel, all in Colombo, were also hit.
A curfew has been imposed from 18:00 to 06:00 local time (12:30-00:30 GMT).
The government also said there would a temporary block on the use of major social media networks.
No group has yet said it was responsible for the attacks.
Update:"At least 207 people have been killed and 450 hurt in explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, police say."
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @03:55PM (22 children)
You either don't know what one or both words mean. Then again you're a religious kook.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday April 21 2019, @06:14PM (21 children)
There are two kinds of atheists, right? the one who lack belief in god, and the one who believe in no god. The first, correctly defined as the agnostics, do not talk like you do. The second is a religion. QED. Does not matter that atheists wear the agnostic candid vest when their arguments look lacking.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Sunday April 21 2019, @07:47PM (9 children)
There are two kinds of atheists, right? the one who lack belief in god, and the one who believe in no god. The first, correctly defined as the agnostics, do not talk like you do. The second is a religion. QED. Does not matter that atheists wear the agnostic candid vest when their arguments look lacking.
Hmm. I don't recall atheists worshipping the absence of something. It's a bit like defining someone as a stamp-collector because they say they don't collect stamps.
There are actually lots of different kinds of atheists and agnostics, and some debate about which labels people should use for different philosophical stances. It's a bit like a religious war where the two sides carry banners, one saying: "There is no God!", and the others saying:"There might be a God, but we have no way of telling!". The levels of nuance between an absolutist atheist position (There definitely is no God), and absolutist agnostic position (It is unknowable if there is a God or not), an uninterested position (Who cares about this religion stuff anyway), a Zen Buddhist position (Mu), and countless other positions occupy many thinkers to very little constructive ends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @09:19PM (8 children)
> ... an uninterested position (Who cares about this religion stuff anyway)
That's me (raises hand!) -- when I was introduced to the term Post-Theological it finally clicked. Before that I used to wonder where I might fit in. Certainly not anywhere in the spectrum of my peers in grade school who went to a variety of churches and temples... and asked me if I was atheist or agnostic. My reply was, "None of the above."
Superstition not needed to answer those big questions. I'm happy with the questions that we can test and answer rationally (science anyone?) and I'm not freaking out that there are still some unanswered big questions.
Here's the author who clicked for me (I think I read something earlier by David Niose to start), https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201102/being-post-theological [psychologytoday.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 22 2019, @02:53PM (7 children)
And finally some game of life's creature became sentient and later they discovered everything that could be discovered (unlike us):
> We don't need creation myths anymore
they said,
> because we have a pretty good understanding of how the Grid formed
In fact they traced everything back to the initial state of the grid, see nothing out of the ordinary, call it a no god. Well paint me surprised, it's conceptually far more difficult to have a creator present in its creation then having the creator and creature belonging to incompatible abstractions.
Even worse the quest for the low level aspects, defined as science discovering what things REALLY are. The guy in the matrix looking at the source code and the evolving state. Low level is not more real, it is a different POV. Useful for seeing how things got implemented. Is it the definitive set of necessary rules needed for anything to exist. Why? Necessity might not even be defined in the context of low level aspects.
So in the same way as the creatures don't find god in the ultimate quest for knowledge, what chance have we got of escaping to a hypothetical meta dimension from which we could finally determine whether our scientific models are accurate, eternal, complete, well formulated?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @04:16PM
I'm sure god's up there, somewhere, shouting down how much she loves us, wondering why we can't hear her.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 22 2019, @11:11PM (5 children)
The Simulation Argument (because let's be real, that's all this is) is no more interesting, useful, or enlightening than the idea of solipsism. It can never be proven or disproven.
Also, you seem to be under the delusion that specific religious claims can only be tested empirically and, therefore, only opposed inductively, with all the problems induction brings with it. This is not so; many claims can be shown to be internally inconsistent and therefore deductively disproven. This is what I have done to your religion with my vivisection of your free will theodicy.
You think you're the smartest guy in the room, don't you? You'd best think again; your apologia are amateur-hour-level bad. There are probably plenty of people besides me who can rubbish them right here on this very site.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @01:10AM (3 children)
It can and has [gizmodo.com] while solipsism is the childish ignorance that leads to adult pathological narcissism, ironically necessitating the destruction of the real self in the process.
That's the proof and there is none.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 23 2019, @10:38PM (2 children)
You don't seem to have understood what you're reading. "We live in a hologram" being not literally true (maybe...) is *not* the same thing as saying that we do, or do not, exist essentially as some higher being's VMWare session. We cannot prove we do or do not, because we don't know what conditions we'd have to test for in order to find this out or not, nor do we know if we could even comprehend what those conditions were, let alone test them, even if we did know.
Richard Carrier, who for all his faults is sharp as a tack when it comes to thinking about things like this, argues from a Bayesian perspective that we likely do not live in a simulation. However, I distrust the Bayesian approach in this case because it relies on prior probabilities, and we simply do not (and perhaps *cannot...*) possess knowledge of all the relevant priors.
Specific religious claims can be tested deductively because, and this is what you miss, they *are* being made in context of our experiential reality. Genesis, for example, is etiological myth; it attempts to explain observed and therefore [almost?]-universally experienced features of the human condition. These claims supervene, a long, long, long, looooooong way down, on the very basics axioms of thought, those which can only be denied by affirming them, as the law of identity, law of mutual exclusion, etc. They may therefore be tested using standard predicate logic, perhaps modal logic for the really annoyingly pedantic cases (shove it, Plantinga...).
And when they are tested, they are found wanting. Mene mene tekel upharsin, as it were. Inductive arguments are nice, and have their place in counter-apologetics, but the best counter-apologetic arguments are like judo.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @10:46PM (1 child)
As a testable theory it has been disproven. [fastcompany.com] A worthless hypothesis is just that - nothing to be proven or disproven by deductive nor inductive thought processes. You practically made this exact point before proceeding to freewheel around it in favor of abduction. Those "higher beings" are reportedly too busy with crop circles to settle for mere implication.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 25 2019, @04:59AM
That article says nothing I didn't, if you actually read it. It's a lot of words to say "as we understand things today, no, we're not in a simulation, but unknown unknowns are unknown." I personally don't think we are, but I also know that we don't have, and likely never will have, any possible way of testing this. It's on the same level as questions of solipsism or free will, and for the same reasons.
The value to this sort of question is that it (ideally, anyway) makes simple religious believers stop and confront the question of how they know what their religion tells them is true. Sufficiently advanced simulations are indistinguishable from God(s), to say it that way. Or we can dispense with the simulation entirely and just ask "How do you know your God's not just some incredibly smart demon who's playing the long game and feeds off your soul energy?" The underlying concept this reduces to is "could you be fooled by something that could fool you?"
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:01AM
simulation is about the worst example of relationship between abstractions. I use it when it is sufficient. If you reject it because you think it implies it requires reality to be a Sim, then you did not get what I wrote repeatedly. In fact it seems that people reply to what they think is my agenda. Whatever.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 21 2019, @10:45PM (5 children)
Category error. Agnosticism is a knowledge claim: one claims to have knowledge or not have it. A/theism is a faith claim: one claims to have a belief. I for example am an agnostic theist (well, agnostic sorta-Deist, but yeah). Meaning I believe there's a God but have the epistemological humility to understand the atheists, agnostic or gnostic, may well be correct.
Atheism is a religion like "unplugged" is a TV channel or "bald" is a hairstyle.
No one is going to take you seriously when you keep spewing this amateur bullshit. That you'd ever even think of posting it shows that you're either amazingly ignorant and unthinking, or worse, know exactly how wrong it is and post it anyway for rhetorical purposes, which makes you a willful liar at best.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 22 2019, @04:47PM (4 children)
>Atheism is a religion like "unplugged" is a TV channel or "bald" is a hairstyle.
"god does not exist" is a phrase that, no matter its truth value, contains one glaring problem if you are naive, three if you are nitpicking.
I have expanded on this several times already.
So, atheism is a religion like channel fuchsia is a TV channel or pepper is a hairstyle.
Agnosticism is I don't know the channel, I don't know the hairstyle.
unplugged does not belong to the abstraction TV channels just like fuchsia, bald does not belong to hairstyle just like pepper.
An objection stating an equivalent of what I said is quite difficult to accept or counter.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 22 2019, @10:48PM (3 children)
So we both think gnostic atheists are full of shit. So what? They may still be right, even if they got there by fallacious means (beware of the Fallacy Fallacy! Tail-recurse on THAT one for a bit...).
People can make whatever claims they want. Epistemology has its limits, including an unfortunate tendency to get backed into a corner and eaten by a basilisk of one sort or another. You must be the meal to end all meals for the one that got you, you poor son of a bitch...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday April 23 2019, @11:00AM (2 children)
In fact the conclusion of atheists about the ineffable god's domain does not concern me. I am bothered by the fact that they call out other religions only to reason just like the inquisitors. Plus, when simple counterexamples show the limits of application of logic, they try to rationalize that instead of accepting that. I don't refer to keyboad warriors but apparently thought out sites like Rational wiki. Whatever.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 24 2019, @09:14PM (1 child)
Ahh, so your problem is that you think atheists are just as bad as you, but don't have the ability to go "My daddy can beat up your daddy" to back it up. Duly noted. Might makes right in your worldview, and I've noticed that from day one.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday April 25 2019, @07:52AM
I'll try to be more clear.
Normal religion: "God told me..." unfalsifiable but unprovable. All OK.
Theocracy: "God told me and you better agree" unprovable and totalitarian. Trouble.
Atheist: "God icecream because the smell of purple is the square root of 5". Provably devoid of a defining structure and a logical structure. They get away with it only because they use terms and logic passages WE ARE USED TO apply in other contexts.
Agnostic: "Well you really can't say" provable and devoid of consequences. All OK.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @10:46PM
Not this shit again.
By your definition, anyone who is passionate about something is "religious". Stamp collecting, saving the whales, teaching astronomy, using Apple products, watching My Little Pony, one can be passionate about these, you can even say they are "religious" ABOUT it, but that is just a comparison of their actions. That does not make any of those a religion.
And it seems that anyone who "lacks the belief" is suddenly forced over to the other group whenever they open their mouths!
Is there the same absolute distinction for people who quietly "do believe" and people who try to convince others of their belief?
Really, "lack belief" and "believe in none" is really picking hairs. We are talking about the unknown. Until more (any) evidence pops up the possibilities are infinite. The probability that some magic sky fairy, as defined by any specific religion defines it, is so small that one might as well say it does not exist. If you are so insane that you think everyone should prepare for all possibilities then make sure you are also giving the proper tributes to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Great Green Arkleseizure, the ghost of Steve Jobs, Princess Celestia, and all the other infinite possibilities.
But you don't care. You just want to troll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @03:48AM (3 children)
Agnostics are *not* atheists. I've been both.
Agnostics (despite the linguistic roots of the name) do not believe that there is(are) no god(s), they believe that the existence or non-existence of same is unknowable.
Atheists lack belief in god(s), and necessarily believe in no gods.
Atheism is not anything close to a religion.
You're talking out of your exhaust fan, and is smells like there are burning polymers inside.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @12:11PM (2 children)
Why are you more interested in using semantic games to beat others than using the ideas to seek the truth?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @09:55PM
I'm not interested in "beating" anyone. I do, however, appreciate facts and evidence presented in an unbiased, unfiltered fashion.
GP, whether through ignorance or design, presented an argument that didn't reflect objective reality. They sabotaged their own argument by redefining common English terms (agnosticism and atheism) to match their argument, rather than using the universally accepted definitions for those terms.
This invalidated their statements (at least to me) and, by pointing this out, I hoped that GP would restate their argument in clearer, more direct and more valid terms, in hopes of improving the discussion.
To be clear, I merely pointed out (as did several others) that those words have specific meanings which aren't the meanings GP ascribed to them. That wasn't an attack, nor was my motivation competitive.
We are all free to believe what we wish, and to express those beliefs. I welcome all such activities. At the same time, if one wishes to clearly and unambiguously express *anything*, it really helps to use language appropriately.
As for "using the ideas to seek the truth," to which specific ideas, and which specific truth, do you refer? Please elucidate.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 22 2019, @10:57PM
They're not mutually exclusive, yanno. He can seek the truth AND dunk all over these idiots like Charles Barkley on a pogo stick while he's at it :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...