I’m sorry to come off strong and all but as my school we have believers that follow this. I dont mind in what you believe in for all seriousness BUT the pictures, some are a mockery that you are apperntly trying to put on catholics,jews,lutherians,e.t.c. We dont blast on your religion DONT BLAST ON MINE OR OTHERS! You guys want to be taking serious? well then do it proffessional..
-chris
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An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny. -- Scientific American
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Miscellaneous
one of the reasons this site was to show how idiotic any religion is
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@ Jennyanydots
A fairly clean version is now up. I’ve checked all the chapters from 8 on. They should be pretty good, but it’s like programming. There is always one more bug. I’m going to think a bit about style as I re-read it again.
cya
Hope things are going well for you.
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Not being taken seriously is the best part. We’re great at parties. But if we were taken seriously, I’d bet we’d get some kind of benefits (tax breaks for buying merchandise?)
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Things are going pretty well, thanks – hope it’s the same for you, and you’re not getting too frustrated with all the suggested changes I keep throwing out. Downloaded the most recent updates to read the next sections. OK, first thing is that I’m really enjoying this, and it does show in comparison with the previous chapter that you’ve gone over these ones in a lot of detail after writing down the initial ideas. No disrespect to the earlier one – I know it was a first draft – but these are a lot more polished. Hope the comments below are useful.
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Chapter 9
Para 4 – “we consider the question. Why should we do the right thing?” – should maybe form a single sentence, separated by : rather than .
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Para 8 – “we can think of ourselves and good people” – should say “as”.
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Para 9 – there, not their.
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Para 12 – “we must to be this sort of person” – the to is unnecessary. Also, “even if in fact”, rather than it.
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Para 13 – “Consider this etc” – isn’t currently phrased as a question, despite the ?. Plus I think the last sentence there should either read “a teacher by example” without the comma, or “a teacher, for example”.
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Para 20 – “might be have”?
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Chapter 10
Para 1 – the first sentence is quite long – I’d suggest either breaking it into two, or adding slightly more punctuation to make it flow better – if you try reading it aloud with only the single brief pause indicated by the current punctuation, you’re pretty certain to end up blue.
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Para 7 – “The probability we assign”, not “assigns”.
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Para 9 – “than you care” rather than “that”.
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Para 10 – “and would could be very boring” – which?
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Para 19 – “probable”, rather than “probably”.
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Para 24 – “in such a way”, not “it”.
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@Jennyanydots
You found a lot of stuff I didn’t find. If you are nit picking then it’s because those nits needed to be picked. Thanks
Throughout I refer to “the theory herein” a lot. What do you think of the idea of giving it a name? The objective morality, or the objective ethic. TOM or TOE.
Unfortunately TOE has been used in philosophy of science as referring to the Theory of Everything. Do you think acronyms are off putting?
Thanks again. After what you saw in this chapter, I no longer believe that the rest is as clean as I thought. We will see.
I had an idea for another chapter the other day but forgot what it was. Darn!
cya, thanks again for the help. Keep your eye out for boring chapters.
P.S. Your chapter 8 suggestions have been taken into consideration in the latest update.
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P.S.
I tried numbering the paragraphs in word but some of the formatting made it harder to read, especially when it came to bullit lists. Sorry
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@Jennyanydots
No frustration here at all. I actually look forward to your comments. I’m really excited about this. I think it could be an important book and I want it to be written as well as possible. I know I have a tendency to be too wordy. I’m going to look at that in next read. I also need to think about rearranging the insides of sentences, putting clauses at the beginning of a sentence instead of middle or end.
I have no consistent use of single and double quotes and need a system there.
If I say
He asked the question: “What is the meaning to life?”
does the questionmark go on the inside as I did here or on the outside of the quotation mark?
I’m at school now, the semester will start next week. I only teach one class one day a week this semester, so I’m still going to be putting in my major effort on the book. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do today, but I’ll incorporate your suggestions and at least those changes will be made today 1/17/08 by 5 pm. I believe thats 2 or 3 am on the 18th your time.
Thanks, thanks, and thanks again.
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@Jennyanydots
I don’t see how I can continue to miss these stupid mistakes, nor how given that, you can find them so easily. It’s strange. But I will try to forgive myself.
:-)
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Going to go read 11 in a few minutes, but thought I should maybe respond to the questions you’ve come up with here first. Personally, I don’t have a problem with acronyms, if they’re made clear – I work in a field that’s littered with them, and have a laminated sheet taped to my desk so I can keep track (might want to ask around to see how many people think they shouldn’t be used under any circumstances). I think it does make sense to give the theory a consistent name, but don’t just name it once then expect people to notice when you slip into the acronym without any fanfare after that. Give it a paragraph to itself where you say why you have called it that and attach the acronym to the backgraound wording at a very early stage so that it stands out and no-one can miss it and have to go back. Nothing more frustrating than suddenly realising someone has used an acronym term that you can only track down by looking back through the last few pages for any phrase that might invlove that combination of letters. I’d try to keep acronyms to a minimum – use a couple, consistantly throughout, but if you find that there’s more than half a dozen you want to use at different stages of the document you probably want to write most of them out in full.
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As for wordiness – you may have noticed I have a tendancy towards that myself. Also to rather over-use commmas and write very long sentences. On quote marks, use double for something that is being said, or of you’re quoting a reference, but single for titles of articles or books. Also use single quote marks within a fuller quote e.g. X has said “we need to be asking ourselves ‘what is the meaning to life?’” If the punctuation is part of the quote, it goes within, usually the case for most questions, unless you’re continuing the quoted phrase with a point of your own in which case you would maybe stick a comma after the quote mark (if that makes sense grammatically in the sentence, otherwise leave it out), add what you want to to the sentence or question, then put the ? after the full thing.
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Partly, it’s always easier to pick up on this in someone else’s work than your own. If you’ve written it, your brain glosses over what it really sees (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor) in favour of what it expects to to be there. Have you ever seen the message that occasionally does the rounds where every word is mis-spelt – the first and last letters are in the right place but everything else is shuffled, and you can still read it? It’s also partly that I hasd a decade of training in being generally observant through archaeology, then ended up spending a year carrying out incredibly detailed document checking – my first week I was given a guide to correct grammatical usage to read, and was expected to identify details like there being an extra space between 2 words, or they’d used affect instead of effect – that kind of thing. Think the height of intellectual stimulation was a half hour discussion over whether a phrase required a hyphen or not (and they wondered why I didn’t want the job on a permanent basis). I was reading absolute gibberish most of the time, but I did end up with some useful skills in pedantry which means I’ll pull out stuff not all of your readers will spot, but once they spot something, even if they don’t notice everything there’ll be a slight jarring each time they do get one. Nothing to forgive yourself for though – I can’t do this in my own documents, and tend to notice the typos just after I press send. One of my personal favourites was writing in a particularly important document that was going to our director that someone would “come in all gnus blazing”!
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OK, got there in between work-type stuff – sorry if this has caused delay in you picking up my comments today, but suspect they’d probably still take a bit of time to get through the moderation. Really enjoyed this chapter, and I apologise for the length of these comments – I think it’s been the longest chapter so far, so there was bound to be more scope for me to pick things up even after you’d checked it yourself. Again though, just compare this with the comments I made on chapter 8 and you’ll see that the comments are much less frequent in comparison with the number of paragraphs, just there’s a lot more bits to comment on. Hope you have a good weekend, and best of luck in thinking of the missing chapter again.
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‘Moral relativism as a case of relative truth’ –
Para 2 – might want to check this with a scientist but I have a feeling theory of relativity should be capitalised. Possibly also invariant theory under the same principle.
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Para 5 – “on the defensive”? Alternatively, I want to suggest that defense itself should be spelt with a c – it certainly is here, but I’m not sure if that’s one of the words spelt differently in America.
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Para 7 – “We’ll what does it mean” – either the apostrophe decided to set up home here independently or there’s a word missing. Also “correspondence”.
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Para 8 – shift the comma after “consider” two words further on. Also, “people in those realities people” – either drop the second “people”, or drop “people in” and add an apostrophe to the end of realities.
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Para 10 – “Also what is justified may BE relative”. Plus, I appreciate it’s particularly pedantic, but there’s no space between “were,” and “then”. Possibly “concepts OF belief etc”.
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Para 11 – Stand in/stand-in rather than a single word.
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Para 12 – check the quote marks – you’ve got a few instances here where you’ve opened it with one symbol and closed it with the other.
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‘Moral Truth’
Para 1 – you don’t need the comma after “we all have”.
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Para 5 – in general, single sentence paragraphs should only be used for real emphasis of a single, short point. It might be worth splitting this up a little bit more to make it clearer.
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Para 6 – might be better to be consistent in use of ‘one’ and ‘we’ in this para, especially the last sentence. Also “will” not “with not be against the flow of traffic”. Only other comment for the rest of this section is basically “wow”.
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‘Societies that are fundamentally different’
Para 1 – “the types of things THAT are right there”. Also, “if theIR fundamental definitions”.
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Para 2 – “strange”, not “stranges”.
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Para 4 – “this is not be enough” – no be needed.
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‘Kindness, respectfulness as universal’
Para 2 – “it’s hard to me imagine” – not sure if you just want to omit the “me” entirely or make it “for me to”.
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Hi Jennyannydots
‘Defense’ is american and ‘defence’ is british, according to dictionary.com
plus as I write this, my mac wants me to correct the spelling of the latter, being a US mac
Again, I cannot thank you enough.
Peter Klaver did not buy my argument in chapter 3, which I believe is essential. I see his point. Also, if he didn’t buy it, there will be others. So I reworked it a bit, coming back to my starting place that I had forgotten was my starting place. I think it’s a better chapter now. Take a look if you’d like
I’m glad you liked chapter 11. I have done a lot of thinking about the issues involved in this chapter. It is an important chapter basically because if you can believe in relative truth, you can isolate yourself against anyone who disagrees with you.
Thanks for the ‘wow’. I looked at it again, and I believe I see what you mean. These are strong and important arguments here. I’m glad you are reading this for content and not merely for my syntactical difficulties.
I was sort of kidding about ‘forgiving myself’ for my many mistakes here. I don’t really have that much ego to defend. Anyone who is as courteous as you can shoot me down with both barrels and I will not respond as hurt.
Here is something interesting, given the context of the rest. You say ‘apologise’. That’s another english/american difference in spelling like the earlier one you found. Funny. We use a ‘z’
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Hi Bill – followed the suggestion to go back to the earlier chapters that had had a major re-write. I like the reworking you’ve done, although going back over it did mean I spotted a couple of typos in the introduction I’d missed! Definitely welcome the increased detail on the theories in chapter 3, as I think it makes it much clearer to the lay reader. I agree this seems like a better chapter now. Both chapters are now much more thought-provoking, and I found myself re-reading particularly choice bits to savour the ideas represented in them. OK, I also found some ridiculously minor points to mention, but got a great deal out of the chapters overall. On the spelling differences, most words where you’ve used a z we would put s instead – I’ve been very conscious of having to keep reminding myself that they are right in the context of your work where I had to mark them for changing last time I was doing this sort of thing!
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Introduction, paragraph 9 – vulcanology, rather than volcanology, and para 10 – you missed a letter in “religious” – “particular religous positions”.
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Chapter 2 – para 1 – reasons doesn’t need a ‘.
Para 7 – unclear what you mean by “they are natural required”. Also, “they are worthY of praise”.
In general, this now seems clearer.
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Chapter 3 – para 1 – second comma should go after theory!
Para 4 – the word version is suggesting there should be a footnote tied to the end of this paragraph, but it doesn’t appear on the web version.
‘Major Ethical Theories’ – para 2 – “a” or “the” moral value, not “an”.
Para 7 – embarrassingly minor point to be picking up, but you missed the . off the end of the para. Yes, I really do spot this kind of thing when I’m reading something in full detail and I agree it’s rather pedantic.
‘The Theory’ – para 1 – “hear borrow” = “here borrowed”?
Para 17 – you don’t need the . after the ?’
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Hope these help a bit, and I’ll look forward to getting on to the next section.
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“We dont blast on your religion”
Um…yes. You do. You and your ilk rail constantly against anyone who is even the slightest bit different. I stand against you because you oppress everyone around you.
Mockery of stupid ideas (including the concept of a god that exists) is one of the best tools we have. If you don’t want to be ridiculed, don’t hold ridiculous beliefs.
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Oops – another one I missed last time – Chapter 5, para 3 of ‘The Moral Dilemma’ – “one side” rather than “oneside”. Decided to continue from the early chapters rather than jump ahead to make it easier to follow the train of your argument throughout, as you’ve redrafted so much to improve the clarity.
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Chapter 6 – ‘Experience is the foundation of value’ – para 4 – “as of intrinsically valuable” – either remove the of, or use “intrinsic value” instead.
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OK, reading a solid block like this, once they’ve had some editing, really does show the coherence of the theory so far. Overall, the first 11 chapters have raised some very important issues and I think it’s very well expressed. I know you’ve touched earlier on the generic style, particularly with reference to use of I/he/we/you/one – I’d agree that what you’ve got is quite informal, and there is, as someone earlier suggested, a resemblance to the style of a lecture, but I actually think that that’s an appropriate style for the type of work this is. The personal touch, and the analogies you’ve drawn, combine to make it a personal essay, rather than a text book, but I’m not convinced that ‘text book’ is the best way to convey these ideas and theories. By formalising the style too much, your arguments would lose a lot of their immediacy. My interpretation of this work is that, as well as to set out your theory, your aims are to make people think in more depth about their own attitudes, and to identify the reasons behind their personal ethical code. The style you’ve currently got in there is likely to be more effective at this than something dryer and more conventionally academic, not to mention making it more attractive to a non-specialist reader.
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@Jennyanydots
Thanks for looking at chapter 3 again.
It slows down my process of putting the latest version on the web to put in the footnotes. I’d have to do each one manually every time I updated. I guess this is just me being lazy again. :-)
Thanks again. Let me know if you lose interest. I lost Eric after chapter 11, maybe from boredom.
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@jennyanydots
I wanted to extra thank you for your encouragement. I sometimes question whether this is as important as I originally thought it might be. The thesis does not seem all that radical nor should it be very controversial. So why does it need to be said? But if it’s not that radical, why haven’t many people given up the idea that non-theists cannot be moral?
I’ve been talking to Peter, and he rightly pointed out that all of my arguments equally defend the agnostic. Sure. I just couldn’t name the book “The Moral Agnostic or Atheist”, but I have added a paragraph to it in recognition of his point.
I was checking out the field of publishers and got quickly overwhelmed. I’ve decided to go with the idea of an agent. I sent out 33 one page query letters today. I believe I am likely to get a response from most within the next two months. All of them seem to charge 15%. I don’t care about that part, I just would like to promoted it as best as possible.
If that doesn’t work out I’ve found a self publishing group called e-booktime.com that would make sure the book was available at Amazon, Borders and Barnes and Noble, but I wouldn’t have the advantage of someone working to promote it. I’ll try to also find out who e-booktime competes with before I decide who to go with.
It’s still a short book, only 98 pages, but I thought I could fill out about 100 more pages of a children’s book with lots of pictures on “Why God doesn’t exist.” Just kidding, I think. hehe
Anyway, thanks for your support. I need it sometimes.
Let me know if you want me to send you a copy of the query letter.
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….But its fun. And you know 4 a fact u bad mouth pastafarians to your friends. Its just ppls natural reaction to something they dont understand. so….. idk. get over it. the pics are funny.
peace love and pirates
RAmen
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@bill tomlinson
Hello Mr Tomlinson…do you still drive the technicolour dream car?
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@ Bill Tomlinson
I am a regular visitor of these pages but it was only recently that I noticed your book, which I read with great interest. Congratulations for your work.
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There are however some points that, in my humble opinion, need some clarification. The main one is when you present the theory (chapter 3): numbers one and two are OK but I would feel that number three should read “follow society’s rules”, not God’s law. I will try to explain why. Imagine two young persons, just a couple of months underage, who have sex in a most respectfull and caring way. This does not go against any of your three principles and yet it may be considered wrong because it breaks society’s rules.
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God’s laws are supposed to be eternal, contrary to society’s rules, which change over time. Today I believe that nobody would claim that a man caught picking wood on the sabbath should be stoned to death as we are told God’s law said (say?). Owning slaves and holy wars are other examples of what was once considered “right” and is now considered “wrong”, at least in our society. One could perhaps pretend that God’s laws had not changed, just our interpretation of such laws but then that is what I called society’s rules.
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This is linked with my second point, which is about moral relativism (chapter 11). I can see your point and, to a certain extent agree with you, in particular when you say that moral or ethics cannot depend on the individual. I would say however that moral or ethics (and also truth, by the way) do depend in a ceratin measure of the time and place. Therefore, persons in different situations may indeed have different concepts of “good”. I am not at all convinced by your language argument about “zzyzx”.
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Enough for now. If you are interested in further discussion let me know and I will e-mail you directly.
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Keep on the good work
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@Felix
My car is a little more 60s now. I went nuts the last time I painted it and it is now without rhyme or pattern. I’ll try to get a picture up for you, but it’s under a pile of snow now. :-)
@perna de pau
I’d like to pursue your idea that something is wrong because it doesn’t follow societies rules.
Take your example, the underage kids. Suppose you were arguing with someone who claimed it was wrong. Do you think their best defense that it is wrong would be because it is against the rules? Wouldn’t it then be appropriate to ask them if the rules were good ones or bad ones? If they claimed that that was irrelevant, I believe most would dismiss their argument.
There is no reason to follow a rule just because it is a rule, but only if it is a good rule to have. To me it seems that someone who follows a rule only because it is ‘a rule’ is merely a coward. I don’t believe most people would stop their defense with ‘just because it is a rule of our society’.
Anyway, something to think about. Thanks for your comments. I may be able to use this.
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@perna de pau
With respect to your relativism objection. Notice that you are saying that people may indeed have different concepts of “good”. But if they are different concepts, why are we using the same word to refer to different concepts. If they are really different concepts, give them different labels. See what I mean?
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OK, moving on now to look at the next unread bit, starting from chapter 12.
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Para 1 – “in are own ways”
Para 3 – “which OF our negative character traits”
Para 5 – “what are moral weaknesses are”
Para 10 – “if WE knew this was true of us”
Para 13 – “what are vices actually are”
Para 15 – “a person might make a commitment to oneself” – him or herself might be better here, to keep the link with “a person”, rather than saying “one might”, which I think would sound too much like the ‘royal we’ here. Also – “consequent” or “consequence(s)”? From your phrasing, I realise it could be a term that’s used to have a precise, technical meaning but I’ve never come across it in that context before – to me it seems more like a synonym for ‘resultant’ and feels as though there should be a word after it. Just ignore me if you know it is technically right.
Para 16 – stylistic point, but I was always taught you shouldn’t start a sentence with “but” – you can maybe get away with it occasionally for emphasis, but twice in a 4-sentence para could be over-doing it a bit.
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@ bill tomlinson:
On right and wrong: rules are, of course, not invented without a reason (at least they should not be). If they are there it is because it was felt that they were “good”. But my point was just that society’ rules seemed to make more sense than God’s laws. There is no reason why one should not also discuss whether God’s laws are right or wrong or to follow them just because they are God’s laws.
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It is interesting to note that the argument “because it is a rule of our society” does not seem convincing, as you say and I agree, while the argument “because it is God’s law” has been accepted by many for thousands of years. Anyway I very much doubt that if you are caught speeding by the police you manage to escape by discussing whether the rule (speed limit) is good or bad.
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On relativism I see what you mean but I still do not agree. People do have different perceptions of what is nice, beautiful, tasty or indeed good. This does not mean that there is no general agreement (it is not because I do not like it that a book, a film or a law is not good). My point was not to pretend that ethics are subjective but that ethics evolve over time and are therefore not absolutely objective.
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@Perna de Pau
On your first point. The reason I prefer the reference to ‘God’s law’ is precisely because it is inappropriate within religious tradition to ask if God’s laws’ are right or wrong. Instead, the religious are more likely to say ‘because God says so’. This carries more weight than ‘because society says so’ because everyone knows that societies change what they say.
I can’t imagine a reasonable defending the ‘rightness’ of an action by saying ‘because society says its right.
But if you think that it is always appropriate to ask ‘are society’s rules right?’ or ‘are god’s rules right?’ then that suggests that they not are part of the meaning of ‘right’, at least not the fundamental meaning.
On relativism, just because different people find different things tasty, doesn’t mean that the concept of ‘tasty’ cannot be objectively defined. If it could not be then you would not be communicating anything to me by saying such and such is tasty. The thing about defining ‘tasty’ is you have to do it by referring to a person. There is no such thing as ‘tasty’ without ‘tasty to who’.
Sometimes I think the difficulty of explaining this has more to do with many not having a formal understanding of what a definition is supposed to be.
Are you sure it’s ethics that evolves over time or is it instead our concept of ethics that evolves over time? I would suggest the latter. That as time goes by we get clearer understandings of what is right and what is wrong. Not only is slavery not right, it was never right.
Another consideration. If what is right is what is kind and respectful, are you suggesting that will change?
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@Jennyanydots
Thanks again. I just haven’t found a way to stop starting with ‘but’ in many cases. I suppose you’ve noticed that I have a lot of them. You are right though 2 ‘but’s close don’t make good reading. I fixed it.
But, hehe, you may have also noticed that I never begin a sentence with an “and”. And I never will.
:-)
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Been out for a few days and not had chance to read the next bit, but just thought I’d weigh in here on Perna de Pau’s suggestion. When I first read it, I felt very uncomfortable with the suggestion that God’s law was one of the three main requirements for morality, as it seemed to jar with the whole suggestion of the document explaining why atheists can be moral. I agree that once you reach that chapter and explain that it isn’t actually needed at all in the theory it makes sense – you couldn’t have that argument without first setting it up as part of the theory to look at closer but you do have to read quite a bit of this text before you get to a clear explanation as to why you put it in there. As a compromise, might it be worth setting something in place when you first refer to this list to clarify why it’s in there.
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Got through the next couple of chapters so I’ll leave you something to occupy your time over the weekend! Have a good one.
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Chapter 13
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Para 1 – “can be reduced it to the other two” – no “it”.
Para 4 – “is that it WOULD be able”.
Para 5 – insert punctuation of your choice after “possibilities”.
Para 10 – “This is what is aT stake”.
Para 12 – “In particular when the question comes up ‘…’” – re-ordering this would make it a better sentence. Try moving “comes up” to after the quote (and the ?) and see if you prefer the way that reads, otherwise it would be worth rewriting it more comprehensively. Also, “by asking ourselves ‘…” – you open the quote but don’t close it again.
Para 13 – I’m not convinced the opening sentence is as clear as it could be here – it might be worth checking it over to see if you can reword it to make it utterly transparent. The overall theme is understandable (assuming I understood it right, anyway), but I did have to read it very carefully.
Para 14 – you might want to put a “will” in here too (before “still be interpreted”).
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Chapter 14
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Para 1 – think “the” may not be needed before the title, unless it’s actually part of the title, in which case it should be formatted to match. Also, you either need to replace the “by” with a comma, or put a comma after the name and then say “HE introduces”.
After your suggested truth no. 7 (taking this as para 4, but wanted to make sure I identified it clearly as such so you can tie in any later comments to the right place) it should be “jump out at us”, rather than “we”.
Possibly a few too many instances of starting with “But” again in the rest of this section – you might want to consider them each in turn and see if you can rework any of these to bring it down again. I’d also suggest looking in particular at para 11 to think about clarity of that first sentence. I’d also be interested to see you expand on the parts of our mind affected by religion – is 7 a generally agreed figure, or a number you came up with? In either case, I’d recommending explaining why you say this, and preferably indicate what those bits are, or give somebody a reference to the medical or psychological studies to follow up on this. It’s an interesting concept that I think needs more explanation.
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‘Are we alone’ – Para 1 – “paying attention to are aloneness” – should be “our”. Also, being picky again, you’ve got a random space in between the end of the sentence and the .
‘Does life have no obvious meaning’ – para 2 – “feelings… don’t” or “feeling… doesn’t”.
Para 4 – either “by Peter Ward”, or “I read Peter Ward’s…” would be better better phrasing. Then “life may BE common”.
‘Are we ultimately responsible for our life’ – Para 3 – you need another word, perhaps “became”, before “totally responsible” at the end of this para.
Para 4 – not sure about the phrasing for “why this freedom…” I think the reader has to make too much of a leap in figuring out what you want to say, which opens it up to misinterpretation.
‘Is nothing certain?’ – para 2 – “he IS not being a good person”.
Para 3 – It’s been a long time since I did statistics, but something doesn’t seem to ring true on the probability thing. Can you find a mathematician able to clarify this – it seems to me that, unless you put a time frame in, the probability must be equal – either the car is there, or it is not. Is probability the right word here, or is chance more apt? I’m waffling here, because I really can’t recall how this is supposed to work but I’d advise checking it out with someone who does understand it.
‘No justice, no significance’ – para 2 – “insignificant”, rather than “insignificance”. Also “seem”, not “see”, and you might want to look again at “they should not have added here”.
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@Jennyanydots
I did attempt to explain what is going on with ‘God’s law’ when I said the following:
The first thing that may stand out here is that this theory is supposed to define right action for everyone, even (and maybe especially) the atheist. So what is rule #3 doing here? We’ll, we should keep in mind that this is meant to be a semantical theory of what right action is, which is to say that the proposed is intended to answer the question “What is conveyed when a person makes a claim involving ‘right action’?” I believe we can trace any such claim to one or more of these three principles.
This is really key in understanding the nature of my proposal. So if it is not clear here, I need to say it another way, or maybe add a few more paragraphs to clarify.
What do you think?
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@Jennyanydots
Thanks again Jennyany,
The three additional ‘existence pains’ are mine. I don’t have much psychological backup for them, but present them because they seem to have philosophical content and do seem to be things that people commonly wrestle with. I have made a few more notes on them in the latest version, which I will put up now.
With respect to probability, I forgot to mention that I have a bachelors in Mathematics. I also teach ‘Inductive logic’ sometimes where I present probability theory and statistics. The principle you’re referring to is called ‘the principle of indifference’, that if we have no reason to believe that one alternative is more or less likely than another then we assign them equal probability. But it doesn’t apply to my car in the driveway because I do have reason to believe it is more likely there than not. I parked it there. I have only twice in my life found that a car of my has changed it’s location without my knowledge. I suppose then my probability estimate should be closer to 99% than 95%.
I didn’t mean to throw an argument from authority at you. I just wanted to assure you that I do understand probability concepts quite well.
Note that if we used the same logic with the sun rising tomorrow, you would say it either will or won’t, 50%, 50% but because probability is involved in rational decision making, the 50%-50% estimate would not make it rational to plan very far ahead. If each day had that probability, then the probability of making it through the month would be about 1 chance in a billion, 931 chances in a trillion to be more precise.
Oops, i just realized that ‘billion’ in Europe has a different meaning. In England it means a million millions, but in the US it is merely a thousand millions. I don’t know how trillion works there, maybe a million billions.
Having said that, thanks a billion. :-)
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@jennyanydots
Is the book getting boring or too long?
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@jennyanydots
I’ve found one agent that might be interested. He’s requested a copy of the manuscript. I want to give you a bit of credit for helping me with this. Email me as to what title you would like.
billtomlinson@mac.com
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‘We dont blast on your religion’
have you actually read the rest of this hate mail section?
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when you say that you don’t “Blast” on our religion, you do, just read the other comments on the Hate mail. 90% of them are people screaming about burning in hell for eternity.
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I beg to differ. Read the hate-mail section of this site. Christians bash us all the time. I’m simply here to defend His Noodliness. And I believe you did just bash us right there.
Here’s to hoping His Noodly Appendage touches you,
-GM
RAmen
If you have any questions about, or just want to discuss the existence of the FSM, you can reach me at kanastag@comcast.net
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I don’t remember blasting on any religions. Does anyone else? Last time I checked, this guy was sending us hatemail, not the other way around.
RAmen,
Nick
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