-2 girls one cup
-thee men one hammer
-countless forums where fat greasy kids snark each other into amok rampages at the local playground
-timecube
-twitter, facebook, etc etc increasing dependency (indirectly and directly) on non-renewable resources in a snowball of plastic “dependance” devices

…the list is endless…

You all know this, but choose instead to defend it, because in the end, you’ll be dead by the time it forms a head anyway so let your kids worry about it.
The problem is not people like you and I using the internet (not that I am in anyway like you people for the most part, thank the flying spaghetti monster), but rather kids who become progressively numbed through each passing generation. Internet wasn’t the start BTW, the main stream media has being molding you “enlightened free-thinkers” since the beginning.
Finally, all that really matters is this: While you all sit at your PCs discussing the validity and fate of the internet, real people doing real things are able to see shit going pear shaped in a hurry and wont be consulting you all when decision making time comes.

I hadn’t checked this for a while, so sorry to keep you waiting for a response. Unfortunately I find on reading your most recent comment that I can’t really understand any of what you’re saying. I hesitate to use the word gibberish, because I have to accept that I may just be ignorant of some new kind of logic that you’re applying. But it does look (to me) like gibberish. Sorry once again if this is a disappointment after such a long wait.

“If it isn’t possible for us to jointly figure out a shared understanding of what state the objective world is in, then how do we know how best to change it?”

We can never have enough data and there will always be a cognitive gap, even if we were borg. ‘We’ don’t know how best to change it, otherwise there would never be any disagreement. It is therefore down to individual choice based upon the data available such as which parties have how many seats or votes and how their manifestos and track records match up.

“how will we know when it has been changed?”

Easy – everything is constantly changing. It would be a better question to ask how we know whether the changes which take place are to our liking.

It is also a simple category mistake to treat ‘god’ in the same way as the toothfairy, loch ness monster or bigfoot, since there is widespread disagreement over the multitude of possible definitions for ‘god’. Each separate version must therefore be treated separately.

I’m confused as to the apparent contradiction in your viewpoint where you insist on the reality of objective omniscience, since usually this is a characteristic property attributed to the (clearly monotheistic) ‘god’ you are so passionately arguing against on the grounds that it is unverifiable – can you clarify this, please?

I also worry about the possibility that objectivity necessarily leads to fatalism which undermines the free will of the individual.

If I can develop your argument slightly further the logical conclusion is that science and ‘god’ are two sides of the same coin.

All of which leads me to think you don’t have the means for or are in denial about the correct description of your personal beliefs and have chosen the closest approximation to that held by the crowd you wish to follow.

I mean it’s fair enough to be confused by the sheer scale of possibilities, but I think it’s just a bit too easy to pin one’s colours to the mast quite as readily as you seem to have.

But let’s try and get away from theology and back to philosophy and practical political matters.

@Malcolm – And here I was thinking that the total cost of the state has a direct bearing on our lives, as every confiscated pound spent in ignorance by the remote state is a pound’s worth of personal freedom denied to the individual with the local knowledge needed to spend it wisely. But really it’s just something I’m imagining, due to my “obsession” problem!

Re: agnosticism. The inscription agnosto theo does indeed mean to an unknown god, because a means without, gnosto (gnosis) means spiritual knowledge of or revelatory understanding about whatever is beyond the everyday world, and theo means god. But, by taking the first chunk by itself, and forming an adjective by putting -ic at the end, we arrive at a label for the school of thought that there is no spiritual knowledge.

“an atheist would be astonished infuriated by the discovery that there really was a god” It seems you’re still stuck on the idea that atheism means “making up your mind before the evidence is in”, which is exactly what I laboured to dispel yesterday. If a bunch of evidence for something turns up, an atheist always greets this the same way. If a Bigfoot family were captured in the forests of California, that would be new information about the world to be incorporated into our understanding of it. Until such evidence emerges, Bigfoot deserves the same credence as the tooth fairy or any other story that anyone could make up. The same goes for god, whatever that is, however you define it, however we might find evidence for it or against it. As long as an idea has the same empirical support as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it deserves the same degree of serious consideration. That’s the core of atheism. It’s not a final unshakable belief in any specific conclusion. That’s not to say that an individual atheist may happen to have a preference of their own for some fanciful conjecture – personally I quite like the idea that snails are our alien overlords. And there are good reasons to reject certain. Also, religions often make claims that are testable (perhaps by accident?) so we are, it turns out, in a position to reject them with a high degree of confidence – the bulk of the book of Genesis, for example. That god does not exist; you can be as sure of that as you are of anything.

@Oranjepan – Do you really think every viewpoint is subjective, and every claim open to equal suspicion, impossible to verify or refute independently, due to the bias of whoever chose the method of investigation? I’ve read your post a few times now, and I can’t seem to escape that conclusion.

“science says science is true and religions say religion is true, well duh, but it gets us nowhere.”

Just… lost for words. Tell me, does gravity work today in your reality? Or has your chosen framework of perception biased you towards floating up to the ceiling?

And if you think religion restricts itself to the purely subjective… Is homosexuality an abomination? Was the Negro in the southern slave states a child, who would be made an orphan by being freed, and was he created to serve the needs of white men? Does a fertilised ovum possess a right to self-determination that overrules the wishes of a child rape victim? Is a girl allowed to learn to read? Should I treat other people as I would wish to be treated myself (by the way, I like happen to enjoy being sneezed on)? Should the USA give weapons to Israel?

Religions regularly take positions on matters like these, justifying them with nothing more than supposed divine insight, and they have serious ramifications for the people that those believers share their objective reality with.

“So for me the question of political parties and religions is not which one best represents the world as I see it, but which represents the best means to change the world as I wish at the current time.”

If it isn’t possible for us to jointly figure out a shared understanding of what state the objective world is in, then how do we know how best to change it? And how will we know when it has been changed?

I like this.

I don’t however agree that it is appropriate to assign statistical values to faith-based reasoning, and I think therefore that it is wrong to attempt to make judgements about universal truth. Our subjectivity generally precludes this ability in all of us.

By the terms of Daniel’s conceptualisation the probability of any one religion being true is ‘vanishingly small’. Within this subjective definition I would agree, but again I don’t see it as neccessary that the truth of any one subjective definition negates the possibility that another subjective definition is also true within the scope of the larger unknowable objective reality.

The even-handed non-assuming agnostic should recognise that there are sufficient different belief systems to include the potential that it is possible to reconile this apparent paradox – indeed, as I understand it, pantheism does.

In other words different competing systems can and may exist simultaneously and in complement of each other, be it with religions or politics, but we cannot escape the confines of definition so it is largely a pointless question to ask: science says science is true and religions say religion is true, well duh, but it gets us nowhere.

So the probability that any one system being true impacts upon the liklihood of another is therefore less of a conclusion than a premise defined by it’s context and ‘proven’ by the appropriate applicable method selected according to the implicit bias of the individual doing the choosing – we really have no way of acturately measuring different methods of proof, so we can only really say that different methods have value where they are applied in their own fields – and no more.

Therefore we need to change the question.

Because knowledge of universal truth is impossible it must be less important than understanding the mechanics of change.

So for me the question of political parties and religions is not which one best represents the world as I see it, but which represents the best means to change the world as I wish at the current time.

As far as ‘libertarianism’ is concerned LPUK seems more like a think tank than a political party precisely because it hasn’t addressed these mechanics (’the other side of the equation’) and looks set to remain without representation long into the future. It is a catch-22 situation, which is why it must look for a gamechanging method, such as electoral reform, and help build coalitions to support these mutual aims.

The current system of politics dictates that successful parties cannot afford to be ideologically pure, so we must all continue to make this false choice until we agree to rally behind one group which will offer the desired reforms.

Another was the attempt to distinguish between atheism and agnosticism. The etymology is of little help, because although interpreted literally atheism means “no belief in god(s)” and agnosticism means “no religious knowledge”, their accepted meanings vary, and so the meaning used very much tends to depend on the opinions of the user. Taking their meanings literally, we could view agnosticism as including atheism (”I have no religious knowledge, and therefore no belief in anything religious, including god”).

A frequent reason for raising them in debates like this is to accuse someone of pretending to know more than they can truly be certain of. Supposedly an agnostic wisely sits on the fence whereas the rash atheist leaps off to one side of the fence before they look.

This is a logical error induced by the assumption that we all share a common definition of religion. If we did, the debate would be over the probability of that single common religion being true. An atheist, being someone with “no belief” in that religion, would assign it a probability of zero, whereas an agnostic, lacking any religious knowledge, would assign it a probability of 0.5, being perfectly even handed.

But we have no such common definition of religion. We can invent as many as we wish. This is the whole point of orbiting teapots or Pastafarians – in the absence of any certain religious knowledge (mere agnosticism) these concoctions have equal footing with any other religious proposal, including much older ones, there being no reason for a belief about the cosmos to become any more reliable as time passes.

Therefore the truly even-handed non-presuming agnostic assigns an equal share of probability to all these possibly religious systems. Each religion ends up with an infinitesimally small share.

This means that the probability of any one particular religious system being true is vanishingly small, practically indistinguishable from zero; this is the true conclusion of agnosticism.

Of course, amongst this infinite set of religious assertions, we must include the assertion that there is no god. Theists love the idea that this brings those snooty atheists down a peg or two. But does it?

Recall that the conclusion of agnosticism is that the very instant we attempt to choose any specific spiritual beliefs based on faith, we also preclude an infinite selection of other clashing possibilities, and so we reduce to practically zero the chances of our beliefs being true.

Consequently there is no point whatsoever in “taking a stab” at some system of belief purely on faith. This is the modern definition of atheism, quite distinct from the simplistic etymological interpretation, and explained repeatedly and very clearly from Russell to Dawkins. It follows irresistibly from pure agnosticism if we simply accept that there is an infinite variety of possible religions (and we must, or we aren’t really being agnostic). It has nothing to do with being absolutely certain that there’s no god. It’s merely that we can be absolutely certain that any faith is no more reliable than that of the Pastafarians. This, to a committed theist, is a far more devastating accusation, even though, unfortunately for a slogan, it won’t fit on the side of a bus.

It’s not surprising that such a theme arose in this discussion, considering the two extremes of the individual acting for their own purposes and the government acting on behalf of all of us.

A person gambling with their own resources, knowing that they never have certain knowledge, will experiment on a scale that they are comfortable with in order to test their guesses and so grow their knowledge while (on the whole) profiting at the same time. In other words, they are to some degree scientific.

Meanwhile, a large government has to make huge, risky decisions almost entirely on faith. Unimaginably vast quantities of fine grained information would have to be processed to direct an entire economy from the centre, and a government committee has no channels for obtaining the information, nor the capacity to comprehend it. In order to proceed at all, they have to assume we are all more alike than we really are, and ignore diversity and variety. In other words, they have to make a leap of faith on behalf of all of us; they have to risk being wrong on a huge scale, just like any religious believer.

This is why the proper role of government is to defend the freedom of individuals, and to do everything it can to restrict its own growth beyond that role.

We should be atheists about our government’s beliefs; it spends two fifths of the national income, and almost all its decisions are based on wild guesses. Government is applied religion on a massive scale.

For what it’s worth, my understanding of Libertarianism is that it seeks a government whose role is to uphold the rule of law and protect the rights of the individual to live their lives in accordance with their individual choices and beliefs so long as they do not cause harm to another. Beyond that, the government can advise people, but should not seek to influence – Educate and Inform, not Command and Control. A Libertarian government accepts that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and should the public disagree they are welcome to vote against them. That’s the whole point. It’s about individual choice and rights. Provide the framework which allows people to make educated decisions, then step back and let people get on with it. If that means people choose to do something you personally disagree with, so be it. It is their choice to make – whether that be boys kissing boys or preachers shouting their bile in the streets. They are welcome to do so and everyone else is welcome to argue their own case.

If you’re really interested in what a Libertarian party would offer, I would advise visiting the LPUK website (lpuk.org). For the record, I am not a member, but I found the website to be very thought provoking.

Charlotte: this is a first visit to your site, but it shall certainly not be the last.