Um... I don't know how to respond to this. Sorry for being so slow, but what are you arguing then? This is why I have problem with bible and other religious text -- if you try to interpret them literally, then it strongly conflicts with science and common sense. If you don't interpret them literally, then there are an infinite number of interpretations and you can use the holy text to explain anything you want. I'm not going to argue with you about the things in the bible that I find rather strange -- I know you would just give me an interpretation that doesn't sound strange. By the way, do you live your life according to the bible? How do you interpret the bible? I've been trying to be a scientist for almost all my life, and I prefer to live my life in a scientific and logical way, that's why I find it difficult to accept religion. I guess this is our fundamental difference. I do not believe I can convince you to give up your faith, and it would be totally wrong to force my views onto you. But this has been a good discussion. Thanks a lot.
I've only skimmed this thread since my last post but I see that we are getting caught up in the old Science v Religion debate. From what I skimmed of this thread I agree with Insane Man's posts. Science and Religion need not be in conflict as long as we recognize that they fundamentally deal with different things. I see no problem with accepting things like the Big Bang and Evolution and still maintaining a religious belief. "Does God exist?" isn't a scientific question. At the same time you're not going to resort to religion to explain why an airplane flys. Questions such as these while relating to human knowledge overall are questions that require different methodologies to answer. Where we get into problems though is to attempt to prove or justify a scientific matter using religion or a religious matter using science since the methodology of each is fundamentally. The basis of science is doubt. Nothing is ever truly proven in science and things are only accepted on the degree of probability that it meets prevailing facts. The basis of religion though is faith which relies on belief that goes beyond the known facts. So which one is right? Both are. It depends on the context. You can say that through science we can understand how swallows fly but does that answer the question of why swallows fly or why there even are swallows? The question of "why anything exists" is ultimately a religious question.
newplayer -- i'm not arguing anything. i'm discussing it with you. you asked how I interpret the Bible. very carefully! i don't treat it as science text. nor do i treat it as a rule book. nor do i treat it as a "how to get rich quick" self-help book. i find some of it very strange, too. a lot of that is because i didn't grow up in a hebrew culture. i don't begin to pretend that i understand it all. because i don't. i don't worship the Bible. cool...what branch of science are you in??? are you in college???
Because 10 out of 10 people die and your soul is eternal. Jesus knows what happens after death, he was resurrected from the dead after three days. My only point was- What the world needs is love. God is love- that's it my only point, God is love. Merry Christmas
But God also has a bad temper so dont p*ss him off! [rquoter] The misery you are exposed to is that which God will inflict to that end, that he might show what that wrath of Jehovah is. God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is. ... It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is! All that we can possibly say about it, gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it; it is inexpressible and inconceivable: For "who knows the power of God's anger?" How dreadful is the state of those that are daily and hourly in the danger of this great wrath and infinite misery! But this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Oh that you would consider it, whether you be young or old! There is reason to think, that there are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. We know not who they are, or in what seats they sit, or what thoughts they now have. It may be they are now at ease, and hear all these things without much disturbance, and are now flattering themselves that they are not the persons, promising themselves that they shall escape. [/rquoter]
Cool. I was asking how you interpret the text of the bible, as in, do you interpret the text literally, or with your own interpretation. But never mind. Isn't bible supposed to be the work of god, I'm not sure "worship" is the right word, but surely it's supposed to carry a certain amount of authority. No? Doing a PhD in computational linguistics -- that is using computer science to understand human language.
I completely agree, but just to be clear I don’t think that quantitative research and hard science in general differs from qualitative research and social science in this regard. In quantitative research we control and measure variables based on what we know, and we base experiments on the theory of the day. Very often we later discover other variables that weren’t controlled and that had an impact on the results, and the theories used to analyse the data often change over time as well. So I don’t think any research results, social science, “hard science” or whatever, should be viewed as absolute truth but rather as findings that are true “to the best of our knowledge at this point in time based on current scientific knowledge and best practices,” or some roughly equivalent description. I’m not completely clear on the point you’re making here but I suspect that we need to go one step deeper into an examination of world religions and make some distinctions. For the sake of argument, I’ll divide religions into two categories. The first would be external, control oriented, religions/sects/denominations, and the second would be the sharing religions/sects/denominations based on an internal spirituality. On the one extreme you have cult like groups that have strict sets of rules and use coercive techniques to force compliance out of their people. (Another feature of these groups is that their leaders tend to get rich and powerful through this control.) On the other end you have people with personal spiritual beliefs who get together to talk and discuss and share and support each other. In the former case you could say that dogma is very important as a controlling device, and in the latter case there is very little to no dogma at all. As a general comment on the separation of science and spirituality, I’m not sure that there is a neat and easy division there. From a scientific standpoint many spiritual issues seem not to be currently testable, but the same can be said for many non spiritual issues. I think you can perhaps categorise things based on certain kinds of testability, but I don’t think you can easily hive off a category called spiritual issues. Many things that in the past were considered supernatural, as you mentioned above, have come to be understood as quite natural today. Also, emotions are the subject of many kinds of hard and soft science research from psychology to physiological studies of the human brain and body. I don’t think that just because many of these issues are currently difficult to measure necessarily means that they fit into a fundamentally different category. There may be ways to categorize them separately, but I think there is a danger in doing that too as it is sometimes done to minimize them and create an excuse not to look at them. “They are different and are not part of science so therefore we don’t have to consider them.” It won’t be for every scientist to grapple with them, but that doesn’t mean that they should be dismissed out of hand.
This guy was apparently an 18th century missionary to Native Americans who was sympathetic the Calvinist tradition of the day, so he’s not very representative of the point of view that most Christians today would have.
That doesn't necessarily mean the Christians of today are necessarily right. I think you will agree that God hasn't fundamentally changed over 200 years, so either he or you will go through your entire lives believing that you have an understanding of God that is incorrect, right? In fact I'm sure that could be extended to millions of people in both eras. Or am I missing some logical third posibility? The Old Testament is part of cannon. I would describe God in the Old Testament (in the spirit of the thread title) as someone that I would fear as much as love.
You are a party animal, right? Seriously, though, are you more focusing on structure and syntax within language itself or on coding better software to understand/break down/translate languages from one to another? In other words, are you a thinker or a facilitator (if that makes any sense to anyone outside of me)? Perhaps this is for another thread. Some years ago I read an interesting little book called The Evolution of Cooperation which used computer games and game theory to discuss social/political science issues. Apart from that I have not been exposed to interdisciplinary studies involving computer science.
Well, to break it down a little finer, there are probably even some people who call themselves Christians today who would agree with what he said, but I think there are a whole lot fewer than there were back then. There are many reasons for that including the fact that more people can read, and Bibles are more readily available, and the large and largely corrupt church structures of the day don’t exist in the same way today and don’t have the power to control their people to the same degree. There are certainly still serious problems in this regard today, but back then the inquisition was still operating in the Catholic church and at least some of the Calvinists and others Protestant denominations were very legalistic and controlling groups too. Thankfully these churches have generally come a long way since then. The kind of presentation of the word of God that Edwards used in that piece, especially when used on non-Christians like the Native Americans he was preaching to, is now for the most part understood as manipulative and even abusive. Christians today don’t know it all by any means, but I think most denominations have learned that lesson. And I don’t think he’s even being faithful to the OT there, but even beyond that, while the OT is the foundation for Christianity, a building block on which the New Testament sits and completes, the NT brings a new covenant which is fundamentally different than the old one, so if he or anyone is teaching strictly OT, old covenant, teachings then they are not teaching Christianity.
I disagree with much of what you said but don't want to argue over the finer point. The main factual correction would be that this sermon was made to a large congregation at a traditional church. Preaching to Native Americans was a very small part of his work and completely unrelated to this sermon.
Kings can pass laws at a whim. Businesses can pass unfair laws to further their agenda. People, in the heat of passion, can force laws that backfire upon the general populace. Politicians can pass illogical laws to get themselves recognized. My point before is that all laws aren’t logical or rational because they’re designed to fulfill human needs. To always be rational and logical is like training yourself not to smell. You can definitely survive without emotion, but you would miss out in your very short lifespan. To always be rational and logical isn't wrong. It's a damn shame. With computer neural nets, they have the advantage of synchronization. The further apart from the time of synchronization, the less common these computers would get the same punchline of a joke despite the same configuration. I still don’t think I am. The best advancements into AI have been to design a plethora of algorithms and setting a goal for the computer. Later, they let the computer determine which algorithm should be kept and discarded by “rewarding” the program when it meets or exceeds these goals. Neural networks, should they receive sentient capacity, would have to derive its past and current experiences despite being programmed with scientifically concluded emotions and personalities. I’m saying that once there is that computational capacity to map brain functions, then that computer would eventually exceed its own programming by making its own art, jokes, and literature. Science can’t predict that. It can only give a possible reason for it. Religion and philosophy would give meaning for it. I think you’re using circular logic. A large number of pleasure derived needs are purely emotional. You said before that people override their logical component in their search for pleasure. Now you’re saying that logic and reason is based on the needs that come from an instinct (instincts are rational?) of pleasure seeking. What I was saying before is that a purely rational and logical person wouldn’t waste his time drawing pictures because it’d be a waste of time, a trivial pursuit. Quantum mechanics was already known during Einstein’s time. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Planck were all of Einstein’s contemporaries. Einstein vigorously rejected it because the properties of quantum mechanics didn’t match with real world expectations. The subject is why he replied that , "God does not play dice with the universe." String theorists have come up with separate equations of universes, multiple universes, and multiple dimensions yet some of them have been proven mathematically true despite contradicting with other competing proofs. Some physicists debate whether string theory is a theory or philosophy. It doesn’t stop string theorists, who use science and math in their training, from trying. So what I’ve been saying is that you can’t prove religious claims as false either. To experiment the claim is paradoxical because it’s like needing to move three more steps for every one step you take. What I meant before, when it comes to religion, each person’s religion can be contradictory with another’s. Say science discovered Ares, the God of War. Monotheists wouldn’t have to believe in Ares. They could give logical reasons within its context as well. Those who follow Greek religion also have the choice of believing in the scientific Ares or not. There’d be a host of several different contradictions in relation to science’s discovery of Ares. Those contradictions come from the paradoxical nature of humans defining God. I understand you loud and clear. I was responding from my POV. I apologize if that is ambiguous. I wouldn’t believe you at first telling. Maybe if there were accounts of knowing that a teapot was there, it would validate further questioning into your claim. There could very well be a teapot revolving around the Sun somewhere between Saturn and Jupiter. It might’ve come from human space missions in the form of junk. It’s a very small possibility, but it’s still possible. But it’s not zero. You’ve been framing your examples with a zero possibility of God. Quantum physics allows the possibility of your first example. It also allows the possibility to go through a wall if you push it for millions and millions of years. How is that as irrational as believing in a higher power? I don’t think an internet forum is a medium to express my personal experiences wrt God. You can serve and learn about God by trusting and believing in other people. If God is at least the universe, then we are a part of God no matter how miniscule that part may seem. Raising and sacrificing for children can conflict against the theory of motivational hedonism. I assumed your mention of instinct as motive in your last reply. You can only assume after hindsight that the reward far outweighs the pain. None of these rewards are guaranteed or empirically repeatable. Would you reject your children if they reject you? Would you reject your children if their rewards are disappointing? Would you reject your children if they were diagnosed with a terminal illness? The pleasure you get for raising children at moments of intense pain is not rational. There are parents who sacrifice their time and freedom to give their children a better chance at a life they’ll never experience. According to your definition of instinct for self-pleasure, why would these parents give their children more pleasure over their own? From your past reply in the last paragraph ( People do things that they know are wrong and harmful…), you were claiming that basic human instincts are destructive and illogical, and possibly that the world would be a better place not to override the logical part of our brains. If you can explain how the instant joy of a parent looking at their children is rational or logical, then I’ll show you how your rationalizations rely upon an emotional core. I’ve tried to state my point of view in a way for you to compare to your own. I think there are more rewarding alternatives than for me to be motivated into confusing someone. There are things that happen to us that doesn’t make sense. We can explain away the motivations with grounded philosophies and theories, but none of them fits perfectly. It’s why we still do. The question bears repeating: It's not so hard to accept that things that happen to you in life doesn't make any sense, so why is it hard to accept that some of the things you do doesn't make sense as well?
I wish. I'm not sure what you mean by "a thinker or facilitator" -- I'd like to think I'm both. Computational linguistics is a very broad area. It consists of hundreds, if not thousands of tasks that range from analysing the part-of-speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)of word tokens, automatic derivation of sentential syntactic structure, to discourse analysis, automatic thesaurus building, etc, etc. Almost everything to do with language is now studied computationally. I know people who have done PhDs on the computational analysis of some obscure Dutch noun inflections. My area is applying some of the natural language understanding technologies to computer graphics. I don't think it's possible or appropriate to discuss more about my area of research here. That sounds more like computational psychology stuff -- I know game theory has been applied to discourse analysis, but it's really not my field. Most research in computer science is interdisciplinary. Computer science by itself is just maths which is very very interesting by itself. However, computer science would be very boring if it was not applied to other science/engineering tasks. I'd say most PhD in computer scientists are working on applying/inventing algorithms to solve specific science/engineering tasks -- medical imaging, physics simulation, bioinformatics, astronomy, music, information retrieval etc.
everyone interprets it with their own interpretation. those interpretations certainly have influences. a certain amount of authority, yes. this guy, N.T. Wright, says it better than me: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Bible_Authoritative.htm When people in the church talk about authority they are very often talking about controlling people or situations. They want to make sure that everything is regulated properly, that the church does not go off the rails doctrinally or ethically, that correct ideas and practices are upheld and transmitted to the next generation. ‘Authority’ is the place where we go to find out the correct answers to key questions such as these. This notion, however, runs into all kinds of problems when we apply it to the Bible. Is that really what the Bible is for? Is it there to control the church? Is it there simply to look up the correct answers to questions that we, for some reason, already know? As we read the Bible we discover that the answer to these questions seems in fact to be ‘no’. Most of the Bible does not consist of rules and regulations—lists of commands to be obeyed. Nor does it consist of creeds—lists of things to be believed. And often, when there ARE lists of rules or of creedal statements, they seem to be somewhat incidental to the purpose of the writing in question. One might even say, in one (admittedly limited) sense, that there is no biblical doctrine of the authority of the Bible. For the most part the Bible itself is much more concerned with doing a whole range of other things rather than talking about itself. There are, of course, key passages, especially at transition moments like 2 Timothy or 2 Peter, where the writers are concerned that the church of the next generation should be properly founded and based. At precisely such points we find statements emerging about the place of scripture within the life of the church. But such a doctrine usually has to be inferred. It may well be possible to infer it, but it is not (for instance) what Isaiah or Paul are talking about. Nor is it, for the most part, what Jesus is talking about in the gospels. He isn’t constantly saying, ‘What about scripture? What about scripture?’ It is there sometimes, but it is not the central thing that we have sometimes made it. And the attempt by many evangelicals to argue a general doctrine of scripture out of the use made of the Old Testament in the New is doomed to failure, despite its many strong points, precisely because the relation between the Old and New Testaments is not the same as the relation between the New Testament and ourselves.[1] If we look in scripture to find out where in practice authority is held to lie, the answer on page after page does not address our regular antitheses at all. As we shall see, in the Bible all authority lies with God himself.
I'm not saying laws are perfect. But we all wish laws were perfect -- that's my point. People who create unfair laws tend not to stay in power for long, and most bad laws are eventually thrown out. I think this proves the fact that people want laws to be fair and logical. Do you think illogical and irrational laws can always fill the needs of people? It's not a shame at all, being rational and logical is not the same as being a robot. Rational people tend not to let their irrational emotion get the better of them and do things that they will later regret. That's my point. I have no idea what you are talking about. What's this synchronization thing? Neural nets were invented to solve the problem of pattern matching. What does that have to do with synchronization? What punchline of joke are you talking about? You were comparing programming languages to brains before -- that just totally didn't make any sense to me. I don't know what kind of computer science education you have, but as far as I know, AI does not always work in the way you describe. There is the notion of strong AI and weak AI. People who believe in strong AI believe that it is possible to program human knowledge and human intelligence to a computer -- these people have pretty much died out and most computer sciencists now days don't believe strong AI is possible within the current computer science. Weak AI concentrates on applying specific algorithms to solve domain specific problems. What you described is so vague that it could be applied to any problem that requires computation. Are you serious? How does a neural net reach sentient capacity? How do you define sentient capacity? The general input to a neural net is a vector of real numbers in the range of [-1, 1], and it can output a vector of real numbers also in the range of [-1, 1]. The input-to-output mapping of a neural net is totally deterministic which means a human can just look at the inputs of the neural net and the configuration of the neural net and calculate the output of the neural net with 100% accuracy. The configuration of the neural net is totally determined by the training data that the humans provided. Humans don't manually specific the configuration of the neural net -- that's the whole point. You are talking about science fiction here. As far as Turing machine based computers are concerned, it is not possible for a computer to exceed it's own programming. What do you mean by programming anyway? A computer program is no different from a mathematic function -- you give it some inputs, it gives some outputs back. Mathematic functions are concrete step-by-step algorithms -- it would never ever do what it is not programmed to do. Therefore, given the algorithm and the inputs of a program, its outputs are totally predictable. The current state-of-the-art natural language processing technologies cannot even predict the parts-of-speech of human languages with 100% accuracy -- no matter how much training data you throw at it, what makes you think a computer's ever gonna be able to think for itself? You totally misunderstood my point. I've never said instincts are always rational -- in fact, my whole point is that the basic human instinct is to seek pleasure which is not always the rational thing to do. This is why humans should behave more rationally and logically to prevent their own self-destruction by the irrational pursuit of pleasure. Some, if not most, pursuit of pleasure are rational -- therefore does not conflict with rationality and logic. It's not a trivial pursuit if the person draws pictures to pass time which he's supposed to spend on relaxing. It's just like some people like to make a fool of themselves in karaoke to relax themselves and have a good time. What do you mean Einstein vigorously rejected quantum mechanics? According to wikipedia, he made significant advancements to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. He just didn't like the Copenhagen interpretation of the new equations. What's the problem here? Quantum mechanics is just a theory, anyone is entitled to question it. Einstein is an atheist. He used the term "God" to refer to the set of physics laws that govern the universe. Goodness me, what are you talking about? Why do you constantly bring up things that you don't seem to understand? First it was the programming language, then it was AI, now you are talking about theoratical physics. Theoraticaly physics gets its name because it's just all theories. Theories are not necessarily correct, they don't have to be true -- that's why you have so many scientists performing experiments in their entire lives trying to prove or disapprove them. Honestly, you've totally lost me here. I thought we were talking about religion and the existence of god, I don't get what programing language, AI or theoratical physics have anything to do with what we are talking about here. It depends on the specific claims -- if religion claims that the earth was only a few thousands of years old -- I can prove that this claim is extremly likely to be wrong. I admit that it is very very difficult, it possible at all, to prove that god does not exist. But I can provide an alternative explanation of the origin of the world, and this explanantion has far more supporting evidience than creationism. That's the point I've been trying to make. Let me get this straight. The Abraham religions all claim that there is only one god. So if these religions were true, then there would be only one god, and the gods of all the other religions would be false. The existence of any other god would be a contradiction here. My whole point is that if I told you something that was not self-evidient to you, you should require me to provide the evidence, as the burden of proof is on me. Similarly, to atheists, the existence of god is not self-evident, therefore, if a religious person wanted to convince an atheist the existence of the god, then the burden of proof is on this religious person. No, I have never ever said that the probability of the existence of God is zero. I belong to the statistical camp of the computational linguists, it'd be almost impossible for me to admit there's something that's got zero probability. Well, let me make a simple example here. Suppose that A is the probability of Rockets trading Yao for Greg Oden this coming draft and Oden then bringing a ring to Rockets in his first season, and B is the the probability of the Rockets keeping Yao and Yao getting a ring for the Rockets next season. Now, most people on this board would probably agree that B is far greater than A (otherwise they'd demand Rockets trading Yao for Oden the coming draft). Then should Rockets keep Yao, or trade Yao to get Oden? The probability of Oden getting a ring for Rockets is non-zero, but it doesn't mean Rockets should trade Yao for Oden. Similarly, so far, the god-less evolution theory has far greater probability than the god's creation theory. Therefore, rationally, people should choose the first one. That's fine. I hope I'm not going to offend you, but I have to ask the question of "why god". I feel perfectly fine trusting and believing in other people without having to think about god. As far as I'm concerned, I can only rely on people and the laws of physics, not god. Why cannot the universe just be the universe? Why do we have to stick a God in there? Hedonism talks about the relationship between pleasure and pain. Obviously for most people, the pain of raising children is far less than the pleasure -- that's why most people do it. The maternal instinct is part of the evolution and natural selection -- species that took care of their offsprings well had a much better chance of surviving than species that didn't. Therefore, in general, it's in our genetic nature to get pleasure in raising children. I wouldn't call that hindsight. Empircally? Are you serious? If the majority of children ended up rejecting their parents, or get dumped by their parents, or got terminal illness, then I doubt human beings would still be here today. Again, pleasure vs. pain. You get intense pain for a short amount of time (or not at all if you get drugged). Then you get a loving child for the rest of your life. This sounds a pretty reasonable trade. I wouldn't mind suffereing some intense pain if it meant that my PhD thesis got written by the time the pain is over. No I did not claim the basic human instincts are destructive and illogical. I claimed that some times human instincts can lead to destructive and illogical consequences. But most times human instincts lead people to avoid pain and survive. That's why it's a good idea for human beings to keep their instincts in check with logic and rationality. Sure, but it depends on who you are. Some people get pleasure by making other people suffer -- we all know this is wrong and that's why we don't like that kind of people. I believe you can scientifically and logically explain anything -- even things which are not logical. You can explain why people take drugs or smok with the full knowledge of the damge they are doing to themselves -- it's wrong and we know why people still do it. Maybe that's our fundamental difference. I refuse to accept theories that do not make sense to me.
So, what exactly is the point of the bible? If you don't interprete the bible as close to its literal meaning, how do you interpret it? For example, how do you interpret the texts in the old testment about how god commanded the destruction of infidels?
It is such a broad area and my question was only asking what your area was within so you answered it enough. I really only know linguistics in their original sense so was simply trying to wrap my brain around what your field might be. As for that last sentence, don't worry, I am not out to steal anything and do not need any information beyond what you already provided. To clarify I was not trying to say it was what you were doing...anly that it was the only thing I have read dealing with applying computer science...to show you why I was asking my original question. Because I barely even know your field exists. When I was speaking interdisciplinary I was not talking about other hard sciences. I was talking about the political and social sciences. Anyway, I was just curious and always out better understand other disciplines. Now I can say I know about just slightly more than nothing of computational linguistics. Thanks for your response.
I’m sure you know more about this guy than I do, but that is a very strange sermon to be preaching to a congregation of Christians. This sermon took place in the British Colonies in 1741, however, so it took place in a very different context than we live in today and there are numerous factors that could be discussed in trying to explain why the sermon is so strange. I believe the point you were trying to make was that God has a bad temper too. Putting this 18th century sermon aside and addressing that point, I will agree that that impression exists in a lot of people, but also note that the bible is quite clear, and virtually all modern Christians would agree, that God will forgive all of man’s sins for the asking.
i don't know that the bible ever contains the word, "infidel." that's a koranesque word. but there are texts in the bible that say that God said to kill them all. i struggle with those texts. some of them, though, are without the context you're seeking. they're psalms where the writer is asking God to be violent with his own personal enemies. the bible never says that I should go out and kill people. i can't find context for that in the bible. and i think everything has to be framed through the eyes of Jesus Christ....who was willing to forgive those who put him to his own painful death. there's power in that, i believe. certainly beauty. look, if you're looking for someone to give you all the answers, i'm not the guy! there are far more questions than answers, as best I can tell.
