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> FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar. You have to be careful he

by Alupis 6y ago

> FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar. You have to be careful here, because you cannot prove God isn't real or that a religion is false. You can prove the earth is not flat, however.

Sessions 6y ago
There are plenty of bible literalist traditions that present falsifiable events/ideas as historical facts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism.
- Alupis 6y ago
  You cannot prove something does not exist. Therefore you cannot prove God does not exist. QED. There is a possibility somewhere there is a God, therefore it is necessary true that there is possibly a God. QED again. You can get trapped in logical fallacies all day with this stuff. > bible literalist traditions Which is where this argument falls apart. Just because some church, group, etc decides to interpret religious writings or lore a certain way, doesn't falsify all religions. As we've already seen - new scientific evidence reveals some truth about the Universe, and interpretations of religion, world-wide, are modified to co-exist with the new information. How you interpret some particular religion is up to you.
  - Sessions 6y ago
    I don't think gp was claiming that all religious beliefs are false and all religious videos should be removed under this standard; or at least that's not the claim I'm making. I'm saying many religious traditions explicitly promote falsehoods as facts, and videos that espouse those teachings should be removed, if we follow this standard.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't perpetuate religious flamewars on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lurquer 6y ago
  An assertion that X happened in the past is fundamentally different from an assertion that X exists. The certitude one can achieve through evidence for (or against) the claim that the Earth is presently flat, can never be obtained for an assertion regarding a past event. You're mixing apples and oranges.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    This video, and the others on the Qualiasoup channel, cover the endgame of this type of discussion pretty well: https://youtu.be/KayBys8gaJY https://youtu.be/KayBys8gaJY
anthk 6y ago
Is up to you to prove that God is real and any bullshit a religion claims it's true. You couldn't even pass a basic Logic class in High School. Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people. Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast. And you are telling me that some zombie and wine converter existed in the Bronce Age? Are you serious?
- Alupis 6y ago
  > Is up to you to prove that God is real and any bullshit a religion claims it's true. No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either. All you've managed to do is assert you have a belief in some information that might be contradictory with someone else's. What you really have is nothing. The burden to prove something is not true is on the person claiming something is not true. In this case, there is no empirical test that can disprove the existence of a God or Gods, and thus religion. > Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast Last I checked, you can believe whatever you want in the US. Perhaps you're in another country though. > Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people. Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc. A lot of things we think we know today, will be disproven tomorrow. That's how science is supposed to work. Perhaps in 100 years all this "Global Warming All The Things" will be viewed like some sort of religion today. Perhaps not, we literally don't know what we don't know with a lot of these things. Lastly, I'm not religious in the slightest bit - but I do think being as hostile as you are here towards billions of people around the world is... unfortunate.
  - anthk 6y ago
    >No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either. You dont' have to. As they said, "the necessity of proof always lies with the person who lays charges.". It's for justice, but it works for science too. Show evidence, or fuck off. Carl Sagan said that too, but with a mannered way. >Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc So what. It won't make it more real, or valid. Get into the facts and stop putting bullshit on top in order to avoid any debate. So is music and old tales for kids in order to behave well and these won't make any fairy tale more real.
weknowbetter 6y ago
You can't prove a god is not real. You can though, prove that the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions. So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.
- Alupis 6y ago
  That's where you run into trouble debating this stuff. Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think. Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours. World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times. Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.
  - joubert 6y ago
    > God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?
    - throwvid19 6y ago
      If you want to see the tremendous mental gymnastics that go into it, check this out: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/biblical-reasons-to-doubt-the-creation-days-were-24-hour-periods/ https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...
sudosysgen 6y ago
You cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't, or that a specific religion is false. Or, put another way, the pure idea of God is not falsifiable. The Christian God however, might well be.
- joubert 6y ago
  > cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't What's the difference between "God" and "a specific God"?
joubert 6y ago
> you cannot prove God isn't real If you offer a definition or description of God, I will give it a shot.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  An all-powerful being who created the universe.
  - joubert 6y ago
    Thanks. That's a nice, succinct description. Interpreting/expanding what you wrote, I think you're saying that God is: * something that currently lives, or maybe lived in the past ("being"), * that is not limited in any way ("all-powerful"), * that created, from nothing, everything other than themself that has ever existed and that will exist in the future ("the universe") Is that close?
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      Yep. Although for the first point I don't think "live" is the right word because God's existence is very different from a human existence. And to expand on that, God has always existed and always will exist.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

by Alupis 6y ago

Sessions 6y ago

There are plenty of bible literalist traditions that present falsifiable events/ideas as historical facts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism.

Alupis 6y ago
You cannot prove something does not exist. Therefore you cannot prove God does not exist. QED. There is a possibility somewhere there is a God, therefore it is necessary true that there is possibly a God. QED again. You can get trapped in logical fallacies all day with this stuff. > bible literalist traditions Which is where this argument falls apart. Just because some church, group, etc decides to interpret religious writings or lore a certain way, doesn't falsify all religions. As we've already seen - new scientific evidence reveals some truth about the Universe, and interpretations of religion, world-wide, are modified to co-exist with the new information. How you interpret some particular religion is up to you.
- Sessions 6y ago
  I don't think gp was claiming that all religious beliefs are false and all religious videos should be removed under this standard; or at least that's not the claim I'm making. I'm saying many religious traditions explicitly promote falsehoods as facts, and videos that espouse those teachings should be removed, if we follow this standard.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't perpetuate religious flamewars on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
lurquer 6y ago
An assertion that X happened in the past is fundamentally different from an assertion that X exists. The certitude one can achieve through evidence for (or against) the claim that the Earth is presently flat, can never be obtained for an assertion regarding a past event. You're mixing apples and oranges.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  This video, and the others on the Qualiasoup channel, cover the endgame of this type of discussion pretty well: https://youtu.be/KayBys8gaJY https://youtu.be/KayBys8gaJY

anthk 6y ago

Is up to you to prove that God is real and any bullshit a religion claims it's true. You couldn't even pass a basic Logic class in High School. Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people. Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast. And you are telling me that some zombie and wine converter existed in the Bronce Age? Are you serious?

Alupis 6y ago
> Is up to you to prove that God is real and any bullshit a religion claims it's true. No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either. All you've managed to do is assert you have a belief in some information that might be contradictory with someone else's. What you really have is nothing. The burden to prove something is not true is on the person claiming something is not true. In this case, there is no empirical test that can disprove the existence of a God or Gods, and thus religion. > Today if you belief in Zeus, Baco or Heraclite you are interned fast Last I checked, you can believe whatever you want in the US. Perhaps you're in another country though. > Any serious religious believer should be put into clinical custody and in the worst cases these people should be interned into an asylum with the rest of the mentally ill people. Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc. A lot of things we think we know today, will be disproven tomorrow. That's how science is supposed to work. Perhaps in 100 years all this "Global Warming All The Things" will be viewed like some sort of religion today. Perhaps not, we literally don't know what we don't know with a lot of these things. Lastly, I'm not religious in the slightest bit - but I do think being as hostile as you are here towards billions of people around the world is... unfortunate.
- anthk 6y ago
  >No, not really. You can choose to reject this information and call it untrue, but you have not proven anything either. You dont' have to. As they said, "the necessity of proof always lies with the person who lays charges.". It's for justice, but it works for science too. Show evidence, or fuck off. Carl Sagan said that too, but with a mannered way. >Religion is a lot of things. A moral compass, explanations for life events, explanations of the unknown, inspiration, community, etc So what. It won't make it more real, or valid. Get into the facts and stop putting bullshit on top in order to avoid any debate. So is music and old tales for kids in order to behave well and these won't make any fairy tale more real.

weknowbetter 6y ago

You can't prove a god is not real. You can though, prove that the Bible is not 100% historical fact as is claimed by a lot of mainstream religions. So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.

Alupis 6y ago
That's where you run into trouble debating this stuff. Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think. Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours. World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times. Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.
- joubert 6y ago
  > God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?
  - throwvid19 6y ago
    If you want to see the tremendous mental gymnastics that go into it, check this out: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/biblical-reasons-to-doubt-the-creation-days-were-24-hour-periods/ https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...

sudosysgen 6y ago

You cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't, or that a specific religion is false. Or, put another way, the pure idea of God is not falsifiable. The Christian God however, might well be.

joubert 6y ago
> cannot prove that God isn't real. You can however prove that a specific God isn't What's the difference between "God" and "a specific God"?

joubert 6y ago

> you cannot prove God isn't real If you offer a definition or description of God, I will give it a shot.

Thorrez 6y ago
An all-powerful being who created the universe.
- joubert 6y ago
  Thanks. That's a nice, succinct description. Interpreting/expanding what you wrote, I think you're saying that God is: * something that currently lives, or maybe lived in the past ("being"), * that is not limited in any way ("all-powerful"), * that created, from nothing, everything other than themself that has ever existed and that will exist in the future ("the universe") Is that close?
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Yep. Although for the first point I don't think "live" is the right word because God's existence is very different from a human existence. And to expand on that, God has always existed and always will exist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]