I'm glad that you found somebody to show you the way to happiness. I found my own way, outside of religion.
That's not closed- and open-mindedness. That is merely having an opinion about those topics, some of which you are biased in favor of, some against. Bias is not a bad thing if it is rational and promotes human well-being.
Not id the terms are used properly. There is nothing good about closed-mindedness as I have already explained to you. With closed-mindedness, you concede the possibility of discovering that you are wrong if you are and there is evidence to support that. Closed-mindedness is the choice to refuse to consider it. How can that be good, unless you simply don't trust your mind to review evidence?
Yes, it is a prejudice, which is the same as a bias. We're merely talking about having come to a tentative conclusion about something being better or worse than something else, something being correct or not. In the case of prophecy, the only prophets with a good track record are the scientists who have confirmed the highly specific and unexpected predictions of their scientific theories.
The biblical prophets, fortune tellers, astrologers, psychics, spirit mediums, and the like haven't generate anything of that quality, and I no longer hold out hope that they can or ever will. At some point, one simply stops reading or listening to them. I have, at no visible cost.
Not in my experience. That's not this secular humanist's claim. We are not merely anything. We're many things all at once. We are living, thinking, material entities channeling energy as we meander through space and time. We are not merely anything. We're many things all at once. We can be described at the atomic level, the simple molecular level, the biomolecular level, the cellular level, the tissue level, the organ level, the organ system level, as an individual organism, as a member of a biological population, as a human being, as an inhabitant of a ecosystem, as a member of a culture, as the speaker of one or more languages, as a son or daughter, father or mother, husband or wife.
It's a straw man to claim that the secular humanists see man as nothing but [your preferred straw man here]. As you can see, this is a comprehensive, holistic view at multiple scales.
We see the same thing when somebody says that earth is nothing but an insignificant speck orbiting one of countless stars in countless galaxies. Sure, earth is that, but only from one perspective and scale.
I don't expect you to think like me. It's fine if you do, and fine if you don't. If I disagree with you, it's only to offer you an alternate perspective. You are free to accept or reject it, and I don't need to know which. They're both fine.
Reality itself is the arbiter of truth. Truth is the quality that facts possess, facts being linguistic strings (sentences and paragraphs) that accurately map some portion of reality.
Nothing can be called truth that does not derive from empiricism and conform with observatio. I assume that you would agree that even if there are truths that cannot be experienced empirically to be discovered or tested , they cannot be called true without that, and such ideas cannot be used for anything. Creationism would be an example if it were the truth. The idea can't be tested, confirmed, or used. Like angels dancing on a pin. Maybe angels exist, and the answer is six. Being divorced from experience, the idea is meaningless and useless.
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No matter what answer you give, literally nothing changes. No decision you will ever make in your entire lifetime can ever be influenced by the answer to this question. If nothing changes even in principle with respect to some proposition being true or false, then the distinction between them just vanishes.
"Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.
"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.
"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.
"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything." - anonymous Internet source
Funny thing about God. Whenever he has the choice to do something that could only happen if there were a god, and a choice that would be the one a godless universe would be constrained to make, this god always chooses to imitate the nonexistent god.
We don't believe in God, and we do need to care about religion, especially Christianity in the States, at least until it has shrunk to a size where it affects only its adherents.
Religion is real.
