Gambling Question

BelgoSuisse said:

Two quotes of the same message of mine, neither with any relevant comment and both mildly offensive. :congrats: :congrats: :congrats:

Can I ask you what offenses you in what i said above? That I called people with religious faith gullible? It's not an offense. It's a pleonasm. Religions do teach that gullibility / faith without proof is a quality, don't they? It's the whole point of John 20:29, isn't it? Either you do believe that and you should rejoice when i call you gullible, or you are a hypocrite.

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Nexus6 said:

I do not practice any religion but I do believe that this universe is a intelligent design . Example: A car engine is a an intelligent design created by humans. You take one bolt out and the engine will fall apart. The universe I believe is an intelligent design. You take one element out and it doesn't work. So I have faith that the universe is from an intelligent designer and what i have read from the bible it seems that the intelligent designer seems to fit the description of what the bible calls god ..

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BelgoSuisse said:

I'm essentially agnostic about the existence of a god. I would be disappointed if there was one because a god is a rather inelegant explanation for the mysteries left in this world. But who knows?

Also, I didn't say religions were entirely nonsense. Most of them gathered a decent amount of philosophical, moral and social virtues while they evolved through the ages. And although a lot of it tends to be quite outdated for these days, it is part of our heritage and therefore deserves some respect.

What I attacked in my OP is strictly one thing that all religions - apart from Buddhism, but Buddhism is not really a religion stricto sensu - require from their followers: unquestioning faith, a.k.a. gullibility. I am only dogmatic on one point. When you face something you don't understand, you should investigate, you should not blindly believe the first magic explanation that is put before you. And this is very relevant to poker too.

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unquestioning faith, a.k.a. gullibility

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Nexus6 said:

I do not practice any religion but I do believe that this universe is a intelligent design.

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white_lytning said:

Here is your failure.

Faith =! gullibility

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buy a dictionary ?

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white_lytning said:

Why buy one when there are free ones online. I hope your setting me up for some twist in your argument i'm not expecting because its pretty clear that these two words don't have the same meaning but i'll entice you..

From dictionary.com

Faith:
–noun 1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability. 2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact. 3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims. 4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty. 5. a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith. 6. the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.: Failure to appear would be breaking faith. 7. the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one's promise, oath, allegiance, etc.: He was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles. 8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.


Now lets do as you say and look at gullibility which obviously comes from the word gullible.

–adjective easily deceived or cheated.


So after looking at both words in a dictionary, as you suggested, we see that these two words have very different meanings. They are in no way even close to synonyms.

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kevrewis said:

there is no way that poker is pure luck because how can you explain professionals being able to constantly place high or cash in tourneys. They can do it consistently so there is strategy to it.

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BelgoSuisse said:

That's the old "i don't understand stuff so there's obviously a supernatural explanation for it" argument. I might have made some sense until about 150 years ago. But by now it's completely outdated, tbh. Please join the 21st century.

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slycbnew said:

Just to point it out, this is an example of one of the most famous arguments in classical western philosophy, the watchmaker - the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker - however, the existence of a watchmaker implies the existence of a maker of the watchmaker, etc. ad infinitum, this is generally considered a debunked foundation for rational argument.

Please don't take this as a criticism of religious thought per se.

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F Paulsson said:

I'm not sure I'd use the word "gullibility," (it's, ahem, not a neutrally charged word) but it's true that unquestioning faith is a virtue in most (at least seen to the size) religions. The founder of the Jesuits is quoted as saying that he'd believe that white was black, if that's what the pope told him.

Personally, I'm not sure how I'd manage severe downswings if I really truly believed God was behind everything that happened. I'd constantly ask myself why I was being punished. I mean, as if running insanely bad at poker wasn't bad enough on its own, I now have to live with the fact that God Almight has a grudge against me and I don't know why, heh.

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Nexus6 said:

SUPER GRAVITY working in the eleventh dimension was a dying theory of everything. String theory working in 10th dimensions was popular but soon became in trouble because of 5 different competing string theory's . Then they realized that looking in the 11th dimension THAT WAS DISREGARDED BY MANY along with string theory made a beautiful 1 theory.. So the old super gravity guys (like the old watch maker guys) where right all along (the eleventh dimension) .. So this example shows that just because a theory is old doesn't make it obsolete and just because we are in the 21st century doesn't mean these theory's are the right kind of thinking... NOTHING IS THOUGHT IN STONE EVEN IF ITS IN YOUR 21ST CENTURY .. Nothing is out dated when it comes to the understanding of the universe ...

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Nexus6 said:

I think you need the combination of heart and mind to realize god ... I think you lack in the heart department

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slycbnew said:

Science advances through proposals of hypotheses to explain the nature of reality, and through disproof of those hypotheses - see Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolutions, or read Richard Feynman. The attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's model of spacetime is proving to be very difficult - but that doesn't mean we should simply refuse to try to understand it. Models of multiple dimensions used to attempt this reconciliation are only about 75 years old or so, and I think string theory is about 20 or 30 years old if I remember right, knowing how science works it'd be a surprise if all of it got reconciled at once.

I'm not suggesting that God does or does not exist. However, simply positing the existence of a God because there "has to be one", which is what the watchmaker analogy boils down to (otherwise, why posit a "first cause"/creator that doesn't have a prior cause/creator? If the "first cause"/creator doesn't need a prior cause, why does existence need a prior cause/creator?), is a terrible argument - that's not to say it's not true, just that the argument is awful.

I don't quite agree that faith and gullibility should be conflated - faith is central to human experience, we don't question/prove everything we face, we have faith that certain basic things just are (unless you're a philosopher or a high school student, there's no point in wondering whether we're just brains in vats a la Descartes or whether gravity will work this morning just because it did yesterday a la Hume etc.). But I'm always uncomfortable with arguments to prove the truth of religious experience that do not acknowledge that, at the end of the day, spirituality/faith/belief isn't a rational, reasoned thing - it's faith, it's not based on rigorous evidence that can be scientifically (i.e., rationally) demonstrated. That people have faith can be demonstrated (William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is a wonderful study), but what people have faith in cannot necessarily be demonstrated - nor does it necessarily need to be.

Social models based on the divine right of kings is also a very old idea, and was justified more or less along the same lines as the watchmaker. Other equally unjust (in my mind) social arrangements have been justified on similar ideas (attitudes toward women and minority/disempowered social groups etc.). In my mind, these are very bad ideas and very bad arguments/justifications as well.

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BelgoSuisse said:

Nexus, you are a moron. But I guess i need to forgive you because you clearly lack in the brain department.

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slycbnew said:

Science advances through proposals of hypotheses to explain the nature of reality, and through disproof of those hypotheses - see Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolutions, or read Richard Feynman. The attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's model of spacetime is proving to be very difficult - but that doesn't mean we should simply refuse to try to understand it. Models of multiple dimensions used to attempt this reconciliation are only about 75 years old or so, and I think string theory is about 20 or 30 years old if I remember right, knowing how science works it'd be a surprise if all of it got reconciled at once.

I'm not suggesting that God does or does not exist. However, simply positing the existence of a God because there "has to be one", which is what the watchmaker analogy boils down to (otherwise, why posit a "first cause"/creator that doesn't have a prior cause/creator? If the "first cause"/creator doesn't need a prior cause, why does existence need a prior cause/creator?), is a terrible argument - that's not to say it's not true, just that the argument is awful.

I don't quite agree that faith and gullibility should be conflated - faith is central to human experience, we don't question/prove everything we face, we have faith that certain basic things just are (unless you're a philosopher or a high school student, there's no point in wondering whether we're just brains in vats a la Descartes or whether gravity will work this morning just because it did yesterday a la Hume etc.). But I'm always uncomfortable with arguments to prove the truth of religious experience that do not acknowledge that, at the end of the day, spirituality/faith/belief isn't a rational, reasoned thing - it's faith, it's not based on rigorous evidence that can be scientifically (i.e., rationally) demonstrated. That people have faith can be demonstrated (William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is a wonderful study), but what people have faith in cannot necessarily be demonstrated - nor does it necessarily need to be.

Social models based on the divine right of kings is also a very old idea, and was justified more or less along the same lines as the watchmaker. Other equally unjust (in my mind) social arrangements have been justified on similar ideas (attitudes toward women and minority/disempowered social groups etc.). In my mind, these are very bad ideas and very bad arguments/justifications as well.

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Nexus6 said:

I want to hear your thoughts not Thomas Kuhn or anybody else I want to hear your thoughts . I am telling you mine ...

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