more of gemli's gems

[_Dr Moore]

Yeah, Moksha's posts make me laugh multiple times per day. I feel like Moksha should be monetizing the comedic brilliance, but suspect that happens in real life plenty.

[_Philo Sofee]

I'll second and third that. Moksha is one of my very favorite pick me up reads of all time. I read absolutely everything he writes and delight in it immensely! That it sails right over the heads of the apologists is pure bonus and Moksha will have his 2nd anointing from Jesus personally since he can even make the gods laugh when they lament how utterly stupid their own defenders are here on earth.

[_Lemmie]

gemli MKWhitmer • 17 hours ago

I suppose I view offense differently than you do. I don't take the slightest offense when I'm set upon by theists who deny scientific reality, or when Dr. Midgley uses my entire life story to build a stick figure of who I am.

That's probably because I'm secure in my understanding of the real world and confident that rational, evidence-based investigation will continue to transform our lives they way it has since the Enlightenment.

Those who are less secure may feel their worldviews are being threatened, and that's a shame.

http://disq.us/p/2at5y5n

Midgley and Peterson are giving the non-lds world a very bad impression of the lds religion.

[_Lemmie]

Gemli’s on a roll:

gemli Louis Midgley • a day ago

Yes, gemli baldly asserts that evidence is required to justify belief. Those who truly believe in things that never happened will often demand that nonbelievers show evidence that pigs didn't fly or that aliens didn't probe them or that gods don't exist. Of course this is logically impossible, but they consider it a point for their side when no such evidence is forthcoming.

Gemli was not adept at higher mathematics, but it doesn't take a mathematical genius to put two and two together.

http://disq.us/p/2aswkkx

[_moksha]

Let's see Gemli argue with the full force of the Interpreter science department:

[_Lemmie]

Lol. I think Midgley’s been had.

gemli tavs 9 hours ago

If it weren't for religions and the untold numbers of faithful followers, I would be bereft. If they knew how much I enjoyed arguing with them they'd probably become atheists just to spite me.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 5024686270

[_moksha]

I wish Gemli would look deep into his science cap and translate the Reformed Egyptian message from this SeN illustration. The sacrifice may have been attempted on this so-called "Golgi Apparatus", but we can wait for Gemli's confirmation.

[_Lemmie]

peterson gets a gemli's gem here, simply for being a lying liar:

DanielPeterson gemli 9 hours ago
For those who may be new to the board, permit me to introduce gemli:

He's a fairly innocuous representative of dogmatic atheism, one of our planet's smaller faith traditions but also one with an ancient pedigree. He likes to profess his faith here quite frequently. Please treat him kindly.

SMALLER faith traditions? What a putz.

[_Lemmie]

In the face of Midgley’s depravity, a behavior that is shamelessly goaded on by Peterson, gemli rises to the occasion as a beautiful example of the better side of a human being.

gemli • a day ago

Let me go on record by stating that I would be bereft if I couldn't argue with theists. Some are merely misinformed, some are nuttier than fruitcakes, some are sincere and others are opportunists. In short, they're people: flawed, infuriating, gentle, rabid, smart and confusing people. I can't imagine what they think of a heathen in their midst, although they do let it slip every now and then. I take no offense for myself, but I'm protective of science, common sense, logic and other topics that routinely take a beating on this site. And if I left, I think Dr. Midgley would pine away, and I don't want that to happen.

http://disq.us/p/2bbxyy6

[_Physics Guy]

Has gemli professed to be a dogmatic atheist? What does it even mean for an atheist to be dogmatic?

My guess is it means to be sure that no kind of God exists, even to believe that the nonexistence of any kind of God is so obvious that everyone else should be sure of it, too, so that unbelievers have a duty to spread their unbelief to others. Under that definition I reckon that dogmatic atheism really is a small religious tradition, and one that is about as liable to skepticism as any other. It's not as big a leap of faith as, say, Mormonism, because it only has one tenet instead of a great mass of arbitrary details that don't really all follow from one basic belief. But okay, I guess it's a small religion.

If that's dogmatic atheism then I think most atheists must be of the non-dogmatic type. They don't claim to be sure there's no God of any kind, though they may be pretty confident that certain particular notions of God are fictitious. They just think that the likelihood of any particular kind of God existing is too low to warrant acting upon the belief that that kind of God exists, where different "particular kinds" of Deity are distinguished by requiring incompatible kinds of action by believers. The non-dogmatic atheist's main confidence, as I understand it, is that this upper bound on the likelihood of any particular kind of God is a firm one which ought to be clear to unbiased people.

I don't think the fraction of humans who think that way is so small. Whether you want to call non-dogmatic atheism a religion is fundamentally as moot as terminology usually is, I suppose, but to me it seems a stretch to call an opinion a religion if it not only entails no particular actions but is defined by refusing to have actions entailed. And of course it's inherently a heck of a lot harder to pick holes in a position that only upholds a finite upper bound on likelihood than on one that tries to make anything's likelihood high. Non-dogmatic atheism doesn't offer good targets because it doesn't stick its neck out very far.

That's my view as a theist, anyway. If you want to attack atheism then it would be convenient if all atheism were of the dogmatic type. That's a much easier target for sure. Thinking that all atheism is really dogmatic, though, would be wishful thinking. I don't understand how anyone who has thought about atheism at all would suppose that it always had to be dogmatic.

Is Peterson really being that willfully blind? Or has gemli actually advanced dogmatic views?