NEWS: Thanks For Visiting America! By The Way, You’re No Longer A Goddess

Again, I never said that and that is most certainly not the 'logical conclusion' of my statement. My point was that if you respect every single belief that is put your way, you will presumably end up with respect for white supremacy and creationism. That was my explanation for why I only give respect to things that have earned it.
However, it's non-sequitur to say that respect for Buddhist beliefs will go hand in hand with respect for racially supremacist beliefs, as it's possible someone is using criteria that will allow them to respect Buddhist beliefs but not racist ones. This is why I asked you what your criteria were - I assumed while you respect Buddhist beliefs there are a number of other beliefs you don't respect, and I wondered how you decided which ones to respect and which ones to disregard.
I'll take a guess and assume you don't respect homophobic or sexist beliefs. But what happens for you when they overlap with religious beliefs? For example, Opus Dei suggesting 'women should be a carpet onto which men can step' or the homophobia that exists in many forms of Judeo-Christian teachings. Do you give automatic respect to them because they're religious beliefs (you said you respect other people's religious beliefs fully) or do you disrespect them because they're twuntish?

That is so far from anything I ever said that it could buy a Mai Tai and send a 'wish you were here' postcard back to the actual points I've made.
I considered myself a Buddhist until I was 14, and I believe there is value in the teachings of many religions (including the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama), to dispel that myth right there. But I believe their value lies in being treated as philosophies to be explored, not doctrines to be swallowed. If you subscribe to one religion, you limit yourself and you give undue authority on supernatural affairs to human philosophers and storytellers.

Would you marry me

So do I. Almost to the letter. I know you really love your own outlook on this but you often get distracted or tempted into telling me all about the super-clever way you see the world. That's not what we're talking about.

I agree with your outlook on a whole lotta stuff. I resent that I was made to sing hyms at primary school. I resent attempts by theists to convert me.

But I stop short of condeming the thoughts or the culture that has lead other people to think differently to me. I know you're excited about having the world all sussed out, who wouldn't be? I just think you need to accept that answers to the 'larger' questions in life are flexible and personal and that it's okay to think the way we do and still respect and (gosh sometimes even admore) a system of belief any other intelligent person has arrived at, provided it does no harm.

Did you ever meet a Bhuddist Monk when you were a Bhuddist? There's a lot to be said for that quiet dignity and humble peity. One-dimensional, dogmatic, inflexible attitudes don't work, coming from a theistic viewpoint or otherwise. You're a smart lady, you just have to give other people some credit, y'know?

Haha, social "science"! :: cough :: I mean, uh...

I like this an awful lot. It means they're working in the Aristotelian paradigm. :: wink/whatever/surreal/rimshot emoticon ::

Be careful with Mathematics here. Some thorny metaphysical issues are brought up when you get into certain serious areas of of Math, like Cantorian set theory (and its spawn), the Banach-Tarski Paradox (which is actually a Theorem, really, and not a paradox, and just goes to show how "mistaken" Mathematics can be sometimes, if that's the right word to use), and the work of guys like Gödel (upon which I believe we touched earlier in this thread or recently in another thread) (of course, all of these things are fundamentally tied together and dance around different faces of the same weird metaphysical issues).

Jesus. Anyway, my point is: be careful with Mathematics. Like any field, it has dark borders labeled "Here Be Monsters" (and also has men shaping its advance and development who, like the social s... sci... sci-en-tists in Zarth's observation, can mistake their prejudices for realities, or at least let said prejudices guide their work in problematic ways). As an ostensibly total abstraction, its results are ostensibly total a priori truths. The danger lies in losing sight of the other consequence of its complete abstraction: that any extension of Mathematics' conclusions into the real world are the results of interpretation, which I think we all know can be quite the bugaboo.

Shit. Am I making sense? Is this even relevant?

EDIT: Did I just use the word "bugaboo"?

As far as math and the social sciences goes here's another example:

Lets say you have a whole bunch of different pieces of pottery (I'm going to really simplify this, but I think you'll get the point). Let's say you measure all their rims, the bottoms, certain curves whatever. Mathematically, you can determine how close they all are--that is how standardized they are. This tells can tell you several things about a society depending up (how many examples your trying to standardize and where exactly they are found).

I don't know "Cantorian set theory (and its spawn), the Banach-Tarski Paradox" or remember discussing Gödel. So, I don't know what to say there.

so it's America's fault that she left her country to visit the U.S. and that's why she's stripped of her title?

It's America's fault that some special foreigner left her country for a visit. It's our fault. Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense. Because I had a lot to do with a 10 year old Nepalese girl's visit to the country. So it has to be my fault because I'm an American and she visited the U.S. No, wait... it has to be George Bush's fault because, well, the news media blames him for everything anyway, he might as well be blamed for this too.

What the fuck are you talking about? No one is blaming America for any of this.

Well, with the well-known liberal bias of this place. I mean, a Libertarian can't get a fair shake around here.


It's PERILOUS.

My social scientist bashing was largely in jest, and I in no way meant to imply that social scientists could not or somehow were not allowed to do or use Mathematics. All I meant was that you should be careful when asserting "if it can be described by Math, it's science", because there are weird metaphysical issues that can arise from certain interpretations of certain mathematical results. What you described about pottery curvature seems to be an excellent example of an appropriate, "scientific"* use of Mathematics.

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*I put the word "scientific" in quotation marks not to suggest that the archaeological or anthropological exercise you describe is somehow not Science, but because my use of the word "scientific" is not quite right. Perhaps what I mean is "nonmetaphysical"? "down-to-earth"? I mean that its (Math's) use in this capacity is far enough from its weird, mindbending boundaries to be not at all in danger of leading to weird, metaphysical conclusions.

I see what you're saying. I suppose I'm just not familiar with the "metaphysical issues that can arise from certain interpretations of mathematical results." But like I said, it's more or less a grounding point for me. I wouldn't use it as an end-all objective standard by which to categorize the metaphysical and scientific endeavors.

I hope I'm not getting this wrong, but would you say that these "quirky" metaphysical endeavors that use math aren't actually using mathematics the way they it was intended? Either way, I hope I'd be able to recognize them...

(I'd appreciate a link to an example if you have one.)

Well, for the most part archeology is differentiated from history by not having a large written record. Otherwise, they're pretty much the same thing, although not. :grimace:

And this whole conversation started from whether or not the social sciences could be considered sciences because they don't utilize mathematics and physical theories extensively (you can blame me for that one).

I don't think I have the world 'all sussed out'. But (apart from my earlier vi veri veniversum vivus vici quote), that is something I admit. It seems that people who claim to have knowledge of a God and what it desires would be the ones that are excited about having the world all sussed out. I simply believe that it's not nice when people tell lies. And yes, you can get into a debate about 'well, what is a lie really?' But whenever people do that, I just feel like I'm listening to Tony Blair try to justify his political career.

Not sure what specifically he's referring to, but there is this.

Yeah, but Pythagoras was a mystic who simultaneously was a mathematician. He didn't use math to prove his mystical theories (as far as I'm aware anyway).

Now, that's a much more interesting question.

Well, no, I didn't mean that the Pythagoreans used math to prove mystical theories. I was referring to interpreting mathematical results in metaphysical ways. That whole "don't let the public know about irrational numbers or they'll go nuts" thing, for example.

The Pythagoreans believed that whole numbers, and their ratios, made the world go 'round. When some of their members discovered that some of the most fundamental ratios in the world couldn't be described this way, they silenced them - even reportedly going so far as to kill the guy who discovered the irrational nature of the square root of 2.

They interpreted these particular mathematical results as knocking the foundation out from under the universe, and it scared the hell out of them.

Yeah, I mean he had a serious cult going on, but that sounds like the opposite directionally anyway from what I was talking about. It's cool though.

And I don't think the Pythagoreans were really what Vampirate was talking about. He's probably talking about new stuff, like some proofs that only seem to work in non-whole numbers of dimensions. Or things that imply, mathematically, that time travel is not only possible, but actually a necessity.

But as I said, I don't know exactly what he was referring to.

It was interesting though.

Yeah okay, religions are lies and lies make baby jesus cry. Glad we got to the bottom of that one.

Well, I am kind of talking about more modern things that are nonetheless kind of analogous to the whole square rood of two thing. A lot of it has to do with the nature of infinity and different sized infinities and so forth. The modern stuff is hard to understand, but another excellent ancient example is one of Zeno of Elea's paradoxes, where he basically argues: Between here and the other side of the street are an infinite number of points; it takes an infinite amount of time to traverse an infinite number of points; therefore, you can never cross the street, and motion is pretty much impossible. Whack-ass metaphysical conclusion based on interpretation of Math.

While now we think that Zeno was simply mistaken, or hadn't follwed his own reasoning to it's (il)logical conclusion, I think it can be fun to do just that.

While there are an infinite number of points, they are infinitessimally small. Which means that the time to cross any one of them approches zero (the flip side of infinity). Eventually, you get to the point where it takes no time at all to cross each point, and adding up an infinite number of zeroes is still zero. Therefore, you can cross the distance instantly. Which, while ludicrous, is equally as valid as his conclusion.

Also, it has been argued that without Zeno's Paradox, Newton (or Leibniz, if you prefer) could never have developed the Calculus. Which is pretty metaphysically mindblowing right there.

Yeah, I know, but it took a long, long time before we even had the mathematical tools to answer Zeno (rigorously, anyway, like, maybe not even until Newton-Leibniz-Weierstrass-Dedekind), so people were kind of metaphysically at sea for almost two millennia. I don't think that without Zeno we would never have developed the Calculus (problems in Physics would have eventually demanded this kind of solution), but having his and similar problems in the air did serve to focus some people.