Everytime I see Sye claim that he is able to know things for certain because an invisible entity that is detectable only to him has revealed these things to him in such a way that he can be certain, this is how I see his profile picture.
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lmao
ReplyDeletewhere is that cartoon character from? I remember a cartoon when I was younger that had that little green guy in it, and it would drive the other guy crazy because only he could see it. Like it would take apart the space ship he was on.
ReplyDeleteThe Flintstones, I believe.
ReplyDeleteIt's the Great Gazoo. From the Flinstones.
ReplyDeleteWhich makes it doubly appropriate, because Ray and his followers see it as a documentary.
Aha! But how do you account for the fact that you know that what Sye knows what you don't know he knows?
ReplyDeleteHmmmmmmm?
At my wife's family reunion last week her cousin, a preacher, took another stab at bringing me into the flock. He does it every time we get together and it is mostly just a source of entertainment for us both after all these years. After all, I remember when he was a little nose picker.
Any way, after some social amenities he pipes up and says, "What a great day of the Lord!"
"yes!" says I, I have finally got a grip on the bible and what it all means."
"OH? says he. "Yup, the true way to absolute truth! Presuppositionalism is the only answer!" He stood there looking at me like a cow starring at an oncoming train, but, after a second he broke into this shit-eating grin. He knew he'd been scammed.
Of course a brief discussion of presuppers ensued and he basically said if he ever preached that in his church, he would expect very few to come back the next week, and if they did it would only be to get new evidence that he had gone nuts so they could get rid of him.
After that we went back to hitting golf balls across the lake, and he was talking with my son. I noticed Mark shaking his head at one point and later asked Sonny what he had said. Come to find out, he told Mark he was converting to Mormonism and had to go get fitted for his new underwear.
Mark takes it all in stride though and has this habit of putting his arm around my shoulder, to show he does care for me, I guess. I like him too.
The Great Gazoo. I bet Fred and Barney have been utterly lost since Gazoo started hanging around with Sye.
ReplyDeleteHeh heh...that's about the size of it.
ReplyDeleteSye will call into question every single premise you present to support your argument, and when you present arguments to support them, he'll question those premises, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum. He knows that if he just keeps you running on fool's errands long enough, you'll throw up your hands in exasperation and leave, and then he gets to declare a "victory".
I've seen others use this tactic, but none have done it quite so thoroughly and obnoxiously as Sye. The real scream is that when all this rigor is done, he turns around and presents his argument: Goddidit. His argument, unlike his opponents', is bulletproof, since it relies on faith, which Sye maintains as being above, beyond, and the precursor to, reason.
Yes, the Great Gazoo is the perfect character to personify the validity of Sye's "arguments".
I wish we could post that pic over at Ray's blog. I'd cross the line to do that.
ReplyDeleteSye's source of certainty is centered on a seldom seen
ReplyDeletesource who is severly stifled by his self centered style.
Sorry, couldn't help it.
What bother's me is that he spends so much time accusing those who use evidence based reasoning of 'begging the question.'
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile Sye is saying:
1)God has revealed things to me in a way that I can know them to be true.
2)These things really ARE true.
3)Therefore God exists.
He's assuming the existence of a deity in the premise and using said assumption to 'prove' the deity.
That really is begging the question.
Oh Maragon, you're being circular.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, you're assuming that he's assuming certainty of God's existence in the premise, which you can't truly know. Only God knows it and since he exists we can be certain it is true.
IT'S CERTAIN TO BE CURTAINS FOR YOU!
Indeed, I love the "Proofs" of the existence of God the fundies pull out
ReplyDeleteOne of my favs-
TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT, a.k.a. PRESUPPOSITIONALIST
(1) If reason exists then God exists.
(2) Reason exists.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
And then there is the Argument From Fear:
ReplyDelete(1) If there is no God then we're all going to not exist after we die.
(2) I'm afraid of that.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
Here's a list of quite a few of the "proofs of God's existence". The further down you read, the funnier they get. But are they real, or are they satire?
ReplyDeletePoe's Law in action.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if there are any questions as to the existence of God, you must check out the Official God FAQ
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHow many Rayniacs does it take to change a light bulb?
ReplyDelete6
The first one says what a good job Ray is doing.
The second says what a good job the first is doing.
The third quotes non-sequitur bible verses.
The fourth asks if they should find a ladder.
The fifth one scolds the fourth for questioning God's bulb changing powers.
The sixth asks if there is any other electrical work that needs to be done.
Oh, and the bulb was never changed. So they all sat in the dark, mumbling nonsense light bulb cult chants and squawking about how awful the anti-lightbulb changers are.
Sye's Web page, it's worse than talking to him:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.proofthatgodexists.org/
And here's the word from some other folks Sye dazzled with his wisdom:
http://www.cvatheists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=568
geoff sez:
ReplyDeleteSye's Web page, it's worse than talking to him:
http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/
Having had the misfortune of engaging Sye in conversation, I doubted this claim very much. But after visiting this site, I must concede the point. It's like flipping through a demented "Choose Your Own Adventure ™" book. :P
It's not surprising that Sye would design a page like this...he needs to keep his flawed argument firmly on the rails for it to deceive anyone. The whole website is one big False Dilemma fallacy.
Someone on that forum mentioned it...
ReplyDeletesye gives attributes to others beforehand. it's true.
Dishonest bitching, really.
Yeah,
ReplyDeleteRE sye's webpage
I get to the (I don't know if absolute truth exists) part, then it makes me chose something that was on the first screen which I didn't choose.
Ah crap, a logic loop! Internet MELTDOWN!
and it didn't try to sell me anything, so I was disappointed.
ReplyDeleteGeoff,
ReplyDeleteSo funny! Yes, they totally embraced Sye's fractured logic!
I'm so intensely curious to know if Sye's ever convinced anyone of anything.
ReplyDeleteMaragon,
ReplyDeleteHe has. He's convinced himself he's right.
Cheers,
Ranting
Ps. HBKS1.blogspot, it'll change yer life!
Maragon said...
ReplyDelete"I'm so intensely curious to know if Sye's ever convinced anyone of anything."
I have been wondering the same thing. Same goes for Ray. Does he ever really pick up a convert or does he merely get a small piece of the fundy tither's money?
I have become acutely aware that this Priestcraft trade is quite lucrative. No formal education needed.
Maragon sez:
ReplyDeleteI'm so intensely curious to know if Sye's ever convinced anyone of anything.
Well, he's convinced me that he's an idiot, if that counts...
But seriously, I would have to say no. Anyone who is intellectually feeble enough to actually buy into Sye's twisted, flawed logic is most probably a theist anyway, so Sye would merely be confirming their preexisting delusions, not convincing them of anything.
"She was sitting there, and telling people that Jesus loves you, and those that responded kindly the next was God bless you. I saw her sitting and making absurd jesters as she was reading her pocket bible. I thought, what a nut! Those jesters were raising her hand up high and mouthing Praise god, then she would swing her hand downward as if to stop something. She would also sway to that gospel song in her head, more likely her church. Then I thought, she is going to get Disability because she is mentally disabled."
ReplyDeletefrom the cvatheists site.
I quote this because I once met someone very similar. I was walking through a park, and a muttering woman came the other way. She looked odd, her clothes and hair a bit messed up, as if she'd been dressed by two blind people who were both trying to improve the other's work. So, I try to hear what she's muttering out of curiosity. She's saying B-I-B-L-E, over and over again, nothing else. Creepy.
Which one is Sye in the photo?
ReplyDelete(on a side note before I go on ranting. Sye has been around for a while and has pitched his argument on mutiple blogs and chat boards. So far as I can tell no one has baught into his arguement. I've been following him. His tag (SYE TENB) is rather unique, so if you google his name it basically pops up all the places he's recently been, and if you go through all the pages, where he's been. I've been trying to follow him blog to blog so I can debase him where ever he goes, so now he's probably going to change his name.)
ReplyDeleteSomeone asked about truth, I think it was Maragon. The Stanford
Encyclopedia of philosophy is a good source for information on any philosophical topic in overview. This is the T's, scroll down to truth.
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html#t
Clos,
ReplyDeleteWhich one is Sye in the photo?
Hey! More respect for the Great Gazoo. He's already puking out of sitting by Sye's side.
G.E.
Either everything is absolute, or nothing is absolute. Either way it doesn't matter, flat earth is just as much an absolute truth as a round earth. Consider the following: (I think I posted this over at Ray's. The problem with Sye is that he would claim that SPECIFIC thoughts, ideas, ways of behaving, so on and so forth, are absolute. And this thinking is what leads to atheists like Polpot (however you spell that) Hitler, Stalin, and religious jihadists and fundametalist christians to commit the grusome acts they do.
ReplyDeleteSo here it is, it's long, sorry, you dno't have to read it of course:
In response to a student who complained that he didn't understand quantum mechanics, Von Neumann is supposed to have answered: nobody understands it. You just get used to it. Of course, quantum physicists have a set of mathematical tools that -- though they do not allow one to visualize what is going on in the subatomic world, at least allow one to make predictions that coincide with measurements -- and so they have something to work with which helps in "getting used to it".
Believers, in response to arguments against religion from non-believers, claim that such arguments do not take mystical reality into account -- that God, or more generally, the transcendent, is real, but ordinary language is incapable of dealing with it. The non-believer responds with charges of obscurantism, that the believer is evading the issue by taking refuge in nonsense.
But there are two issues here. The first is whether or not there is anything that is real but where all attempts at description -- staying within the confines of common sense language and Aristotelian logic -- fail. The second is what we do about it. I would argue, first, that the subatomic world is such a reality, though that alone does not grant license to the believer to believe (in God or whatever). To the objection that there is a mathematical language (which of course obeys Aristotelian logic -- the laws of identity, contradiction, and the excluded middle) for quantum physics, I repeat that this language does not describe the reality -- it just allows the physicist to make predictions. Hence there are a multitude of interpretations of that world, all of which are metaphysical positions, not scientific.
But, secondly, I would argue that there is an even more obvious reality that qualifies, namely plain, ordinary, everyday consciousness. The reason it qualifies is that the "now" is not an instant -- a point on time's continuum, but instead is extended over a small stretch of time (and space). Because the now is extended, I don't see any way that it could emerge from a strictly spatiotemporal process. In a spatiotemporal process every event is separated in time and/or space from every other event. Consciousness, on the other hand, puts together zillions of these separated events to form the "now". Within the "now" is the experience of time passing, but how is that possible? Consciousness somehow connects those zillions of events into one flowing whole, while within a strictly spatiotemporal process there is no way for events to aggregate as experience of anything larger than a single event. As I see it, this means that consciousness transcends time (and space), and so cannot itself be a consequence of a spatiotemporal process.
Granted, the argument in the preceding paragraph is no more than arm-waving. But there is enough of a mystery to consciousness that it leads a diehard materialist like Colin McGinn to assert that he doesn't expect there ever to be an explanation of consciousness, and another (David Chalmers) to hypothesize what he calls "naturalist dualism" to account for consciousness. What I propose instead is to assert the reality of the non-spatiotemporal (which in theological language is called the eternal -- not to be confused with time everlasting). What if the reason that quantum reality defies comprehension is that it too is non-spatiotemporal? That would "explain" how an unobserved electron could be in a superposition of states, that the position/momentum uncertainty is there simply because -- unobserved -- quantum particles are simply not at definite spatiotemporal locations, because at that level there is no space and time. And, of course, it would "account for" the non-locality observed in the Aspect experiments. But note that I put the words "explain" and "account for" in scare quotes, because appealing to non-spatiotemporal reality is not an understandable answer. But the point is that if one buys into this line of argumentation, then one should not expect one. Yet something definite has been argued for: that there is a reality for which our ordinary language fails.
What clinches the argument for me -- and is the reason I became religious -- is that mystics have been saying for millenia that fundamental reality is not spatiotemporal. And they have said so, or so they claim, by virtue of knowledge (of "experiencing" non-spatiotemporal reality), not by metaphysical guesswork. Should we believe them? Given the argumentation above I have no problem believing them. But it should be pointed out that mystics also say something else, that just arguing from consciousness and/or quantum physics does not, and that is that the eternal is not merely real, but also Good, and that it is possible to realize that Goodness. It is that addition that turns all this from metaphysical speculation to religion.
This, then, is my answer to the first issue: there is a reality that defies common sense language, and why it must be dealt with. Still to come: how to forge a language to deal with it.
Guys,
ReplyDeleteSye's main problem is his absolute dishonesty (pun absolutely intended). Way too evident. way too much in-your-face.
Then everything else.
G.E.
I had to laugh when he responded to me by asking why circularity wasn't allowed in my worldview. So dim on so many levels.
ReplyDeleteKiwiInOz sez:
ReplyDeleteI had to laugh when he responded to me by asking why circularity wasn't allowed in my worldview.
I had much the same experience when I stated that the Bible contains many factual errors and internal inconsistencies. Sye responded by asking why factual errors and internal inconsistencies were "not allowed according to my worldview".
When you're faced with such mind-numbing stupidity, sometimes the only way to avoid screaming is to laugh.