gobrewers14

> For a positivist, you’re not very strong on logic.

When the ad hominems start I know I'm on the right track

> The rock has no will / The god, real or not, is a being with a will.

How do you know god is a being with a will? This is the fallacy of special pleading. You are defining god and giving it characteristics that precisely allows you to say it is different than something with no will.

> It doesn’t matter if you or I believe praying works, the point is that prayer is talking to a sentient god. Magic spells is not.

And both are superstition.

> You learn this stuff in middle school.

I went to a school that taught math & science.

>> Sure, you can use superstition as a slur for things you don’t believe in.

> I’m not dictating what the word means

That is precisely what you are doing by trying to insinuate that I am using a "slur". You do not have the authority to conjure a belief system out of thin air, assert that it is true without evidence, and start dictating to people the manner in which they are allowed to speak about it.

> In your example the difference is that the rock effect is automatic, like gravity, but the god is a sentient being that has a will.

There is no difference. This is the fallacy of special pleading. You're saying that the example with god is different because you defined god to be different from the thing you don't want it to be the same as. You are presupposing gods existence. There is no evidence such an entity exists and is therefore superstition.

You're not the gatekeeper of words. Christianity and Islam are both superstitions.

> A person believes something that results in superstition. This definition states that superstition creates itself.

This is nonsense. Nothing is "created" when someone says something superstitious. There is no cause and effect. Supernatural entities/realms either exits or they do not. And there is zero evidence they do. Whether or not they actually do doesn't matter, it is rational to not believe in them until someone presents evidence for their existence.

> Godel's incompleteness theorem proves that we cannot prove all the laws in the universe

His theorem says no such thing. It simply makes a statement about the trade-off between the consistency of axiomatic systems and the provability of truth statements. I could easily just argue the universe is a system with inconsistent axioms where every law can be proved.

> we know conclusively that recent discoveries (eg, James Webb showing unexpected galaxy sizes) show that much of our current "laws of nature" are definitely in conflict with reality

This is called science. We collect evidence. We develop approximations of reality that best conform to this evidence. We collect new evidence. We refine our approximations.

> so many theoretical physicists are "simulationists" where they believe the universe is a simulation where the creators can exert complete control

I don't care what "so many theoretical physicists" believe. I care what they publish in peer-reviewed literature.

> Perhaps humans are simply hardwired for religion.

Perhaps humans are hardwired to make spears and kill each other or hunt and gather. That doesn't mean we should be doing that in 2023.

I touch (swear an oath and break it to) a rock (a god) and I receive luck (anger).

Both are superstitions. The rock example is actually less superstitious because rocks actually exist. There is zero evidence gods exist.

> Religion and superstition are different concepts.

Please point to the part in my original response where I said religion and superstition are the same concept.

I said believing in a god is superstition. Which it is.

Superstition (n): A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.

>The founders saw it necessary that people have a religious based moral system. The same system and values that they based the government on.

In the system of government they created women were not able to participate in the body politic and slavery was legal. The suppression of women in society and slavery are both endorsed in the bible. Being superstitious has nothing to do with morality or ethics.

> The premise all men are created equal relies on religion to be true. Inalienable rights is a judao Christian idea.

This is demonstrably false. Christianity had 17 centuries before the French Revolution to setup a system of government based on these ideas but instead was aligned with Monarchy and Feudalism. Equality and inalienable rights are Enlightenment ideas.

Believing that there is a god to promise something to is the definition of superstition.

The Catholic Church declaring that a collection of fictional stories are the word of god and 1.345 billion people believing that does not make the collection of stories not fictional. You're appealing to authority and the populace.

> In the 1960s the army, with support from the U.S. CIA, committed a mass slaughter of half a million suspected communists. In 1998 there was a huge series of riots against ethnic Chinese people, which ended up toppling the country’s dictator at the time.

There's book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins that goes into this topic in detail. It's a very interesting (and tragic) read.

> Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated

You're implying:

something is scientifically demonstrated -> government is bound by it

What I said was:

government has bounded something -> it can be scientifically or logically demonstrated

> Hundreds, if not thousands of years of fairly consistent belief that life is sacred is hardly a whim

You're appealing to the populace. How long or who believes something has no bearing on whether or not it is true or whether anyone should care about it. People thought the earth was the center of the universe for a long time too. Also, something cannot be "sacred" universally, only conditionally.

> How would you differentiate this argument for abortion versus for slavery?

Slavery unambiguously violates the autonomy of another human being.

If it could be demonstrated scientifically what life is and when it begins and that happens to be at conecption, then yes, abortion should be outlawed. But we don't know this. In a free and open society, in the absence of knowledge, we should default to people making their own choices; we should default to freedom and not restriction.

> This ruling does not prohibit anything

Missouri just banned abortion as a result of this being overturned, so yes, it does.

> other people's beliefs are entirely a sufficient condition in what the government will do

False. Other people's beliefs are a necessary condition. If I convince 51% of the populace geminis are evil and should be imprisoned, this is not a sufficient condition for the government to implement this policy. We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true. This is the sufficient condition. The necessary condition is a majority believing it. Likewise, having an objective, unambiguous, scientific definition of what life is and when it begins is the sufficient condition for outlawing abortion and a majority believing that is the necessary condition. A characteristic of a free society is not one where the government creates laws based on the whims of particular religious groups.

I don't give a shit what other people believe. People believing in things is not a sufficient condition for the government to prohibit something.