What is a Christian fundamentalist?

[PureX]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

Would you admit then that this statement could also be wrong, even though you think it's right?

Resting in Him,
Clete

Can you admit that God may not exist, or that if God does exist that your conception of God may be completely wrong? Can you admit that your belief in the existence and nature of God is based entirely on faith and personal experiences that could easily be the product of bias, wishful thinking, and self-hypnosis?

 

[Clete]

Originally posted by PureX

Can you admit that God may not exist, or that if God does exist that your conception of God may be completely wrong? Can you admit that your belief in the existence and nature of God is based entirely on faith and personal experiences that could easily be the product of bias, wishful thinking, and self-hypnosis?

"...easily be the product of bias, wishful thinking, and self-hypnosis"?

No, to admit this would be to abmit that I was completely irrational in which case my admition would itself be irrational and therefore meaningless. In otherwords if you cannot know that you are rational, then to admit that you might not be is meaningless because it would be equally impossible to tell if such an admition was itself irrational, you find yourself in an endless loop of logic that has as it's only escape an acceptance of one's own rationality.

However, I do freely and boldly admit that ALL of my beliefs about not only God but everything else must be falsifiable or they are altogether meaningless. If, for example, you could show that Jesus did in fact die and stay dead, that the resurection is false, then you will have, in one stroke, completely dismantled the entire Christian faith. That's a pretty big 'if' but it is an 'if' all the same and the payoff for having accomplished it is equally as big. And that's only one of dozens of ways in which one could falsify all or part of the Christian world view.

So, I've answered your question, now I insist that you answer mine.

You said...

Originally posted by PureX
The difference is that I understand that I can be wrong even when I think I'm right. This is exactly the characteristic that fundamentalists lack. If you lack this ability, you are a fundamentalist, if you possess this ability, you are not a fundamentalist. That is what I am saying.

Would you admit then that this statement could also be wrong, even though you think it's right?

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[geralduk]

Originally posted by jjjg

purex has a hangup with relativism but doesn't understand what relativism defines or has no argument why relativism would somehow limit what we know.

Just because we don't have absolute knowledge doesn't mean what we do know is false. We just have a limited knowledge of truth.:hammer: :dead: :dead: :grave: :grave:

Something to chew on...?


Jesus IS the truth.

For " I am the way the TRUTH and the LIFE"

If then you KNOW Him you know the truth.
and allbeit we may not know all that is as yet HIM.
Nevertheless even as children when BORN know not thier parents in all things.
YET do they know them.
But then PROGRESIVELY come to know as they "folow onto know" and will in time know them even as they are known.

Therefore the TRUTH is NOT CHANGED or is LESS than what it is as it were by mens ignorance of it.
But WE are called to GROW in our knowldge of the truth and be established in it.

and by knowing the truth we recognise error.

 

[PureX]

Originally posted by jjjg Just because we don't have absolute knowledge doesn't mean what we do know is false. We just have a limited knowledge of truth.

But fundamentalists think they DO have absolute knowledge of the truth. I agree with you that what you think you know to be true could certainly well be true. But it could also be untrue without your realizing it because your knowledge of truth is not complete and is therefor not absolute.

But fundamentalists think their knowledge of the truth IS complete and is absolute. therefor, they believe that they cannot possibly be wrong. And it's this inability to doubt themselves that makes them so dangerous, because it renders them capable of all sorts of harm against themselves and others without even any second thoughts - in effect, without conscience.

I brought up those fundamentalists in Texas that went on the witch hunt as an example. It never once occurred to them that they might be wrong in the way they were getting their "evidence" or the people they were accusing of terrible crimes. And even after the state's attourney showed up and exposed their little witch hunt for what it was, none of them showed any remorse at all, or even appologized. They were absolutely certain that they were right. They had no doubts, and therefor they had no second thoughts at all about what they were doing.

This is how people come to strap on bombs or to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. You and I would not do these things because we have the capacity to doubt our own ideas and motives. But fundamentalists have resigned that capacity. They are absolutely right in their own minds, and so they become capable of anything.

 

[PureX]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

"...easily be the product of bias, wishful thinking, and self-hypnosis"?

No, to admit this would be to abmit that I was completely irrational in which case my admition would itself be irrational and therefore meaningless.

How does admitting that you could possibly be wrong about what you believe to be true make you irrational and your life meaningless? I don't understand this thinking at all.

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer In otherwords if you cannot know that you are rational, then to admit that you might not be is meaningless because it would be equally impossible to tell if such an admition was itself irrational, you find yourself in an endless loop of logic that has as it's only escape an acceptance of one's own rationality.

Welcome to the human condition. See, the thing is that we are not God. We don't get to be right all the time, and we don't get to be certain that we're right even when we think we are, because we're not omniscient. This is why we have to live by faith, and this is why we have to always doubt our own beliefs and motives. Why do you find this so abhorant? Why do you see being a limited and ignorant human being as a "meaningless" existence? Isn't this what God created you to be - at least for the time being?

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer However, I do freely and boldly admit that ALL of my beliefs about not only God but everything else must be falsifiable or they are altogether meaningless. If, for example, you could show that Jesus did in fact die and stay dead, that the resurection is false, then you will have, in one stroke, completely dismantled the entire Christian faith. That's a pretty big 'if' but it is an 'if' all the same and the payoff for having accomplished it is equally as big. And that's only one of dozens of ways in which one could falsify all or part of the Christian world view.

You seem to have a very twisted idea of the concept of "falsifiable". If Preston the Prestidigitator does a magic card trick for you, and "reads your mind", do you assume that he really read your mind until someone can prove to you that he did not? I doubt that you will.

Yet the bible tells you that Jesus performed magical feats and you assume that they must be real until someone can prove to you that they are not. Why this inconsistancy in your skepticism? Could it be that you WANT to believe in Jesus' feats of magic, but you don't want to believe in Preston's feats of magic, so you've simply accepted one and denied the other out of pure selfish bias?

And now that you have accepted Jesus' feats of magic as real, what evidence would you require as the "falsification" of your beliefs? Is such evidence even physically or humanly obtainable? And if it's not (and I suspect it is not), aren't you really just 'stacking the deck' against falsification so that it can't possibly occur? And isn't that just more selfish bias? So how honest are you really being with us and with yourself when you claim that your mind is open to the possibility that you might be wrong regarding the nature and existence of God?

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer So, I've answered your question, now I insist that you answer mine.

As a limited and finite human being, I could be wrong about anything. This is why I have to have faith that even though I can never be certain about what's right or true, that God does exist and that it's God's nature to see me through this 'darkness'. I don't "know" this to be so, I just hope that it's so and then try to live by that hope.

Faith isn't pretending that we know all about God. Faith is understanding that we DON'T know, but trusting in God's love, anyway.

Fundamentalism is built on self-centered fear, ego, and lies about the nature of the human condition. And it's this dishonesty that makes fundamentalists so aggressive and antagonistic. In order to maintain these lies the fundamentalists have to fight against everything and everyone one that exemplifies reality and truth. Fundamentalists are addicted to the delusion that they can (like God) be absolutely right.

But they can't. They're not. And they are toxic to the rest of us as long as they keep tryng to maintain these lies.

 

[smaller]

As a limited and finite human being, I could be wrong about anything. This is why I have to have faith that even though I can never be certain about what's right or true, that God does exist and that it's God's nature to see me through this 'darkness'. I don't "know" this to be so, I just hope that it's so and then try to live by that hope.

Faith isn't pretending that we know all about God. Faith is understanding that we DON'T know, but trusting in God's love, anyway.

That is about as fine a description of faith from anyone that I have seen at TOL

From a non fundie no less

 

[Clete]

smaller,

You are stupid and a waste of time. If you think that what PureX is talking about has anything to do with genuine faith you are also not a Christian, fundamentalist or otherwise. I really wish you would just go away. In fact, as for you me, you just did go away. You just made my ignore list, I've wasted entirely too much time reading your stupid drivel already.

Clete

 

[Clete]

PureX,

Since you aren't even sure yourself that what you say is true, then why should I give a rats backside about anythying you have to say?

Please don't respond until you know for sure that you're giving me an acurate answer to my question.

Resting in Him,
Clete

 

[smaller]

Clete, I would take Purex's statement over your nonsense any day. You have yet to make any type of reasonable response to any of our exchanges anyway.

So I am on your IGNORE list and you have always been on my IGNORant list. So what? You are a mealy mouthed puppet of some psuedo religious damnation camp. bravo.

 

[PureX]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

PureX,

Since you aren't even sure yourself that what you say is true, then why should I give a rats backside about anythying you have to say?

Please don't respond until you know for sure that you're giving me an acurate answer to my question.

Resting in Him,
Clete

You weren't going to "give a rat's backside" about anything I said, anyway, because you're so certain that you're absolutely right, already.

 

[Apollo]

Never been big on math, but this much I know: When you add one Christian fundamentalist with ZERO sense to another Christian fundamentalist with ZERO sense, it adds up to NON-sense.

You da man, PureX.

 

[Clete]

Originally posted by PureX

You weren't going to "give a rat's backside" about anything I said, anyway, because you're so certain that you're absolutely right, already.

How do you know this to be true, or do you?

 

[Cyrus of Persia]

Originally posted by Clete Pfeiffer

How do you know this to be true, or do you?

Clete, your posts give the best answer to it.

 

[BChristianK]

PureX said:

It is self-evident that no two things are absolutely identical. And as they are not absolutely identical, they can't be absolutely equal, either. They can only be deemed equal relative to the tolerance of variation that we are applying to each instance. If you refuse to accept this then you are being willfully irrational and there isn't really any way I can overcome that for you. There is no "proof" or reason that I can offer that can overcome the willful denial of proof and reason.

Here is the beginning of an invalid conclusion. You’ll attempt to argue from this that because no two things can be absolutely equal in every way, then no two things added together can be absolutely 2. The problem with this is that your premises don’t hold up categorically.


You can have a penny, lets say it weighs about 2.4 grams (round figure) and then take another penny, and for some reason this one is a bit odd, it isn’t perfectly round and it has tarnished, it weighs about 2.2 grams (for some reason, tarnished pennies weigh less, who knew?). You put them on the scale and they weigh 4.6 grams together. You do the same experiment with two other pennies and you get 4.75 grams. Can you conclude that not all pennies are equal then?
Nope. You must qualify your statement. You can claim that they are unequal in regard to weight. You can’t claim that they are unequal in regard to monetary value. Nor can you claim that they are not equally identifiable and individual units of the category entitled penny.


PureX, you and I both know that if you take the first two pennies and add them together, ya still get two cents. You can get two penny candies and you still need 98 pennies, regardless of the weight, to make a dollar.

So when you say that no two pennies are alike in every way, I say, “So what?”

The fact that they aren’t the same in every way doesn’t even come close to proving that they don’t equal two pennies.


Now you say:

This is the case in EVERY example.

Well in your first example it didn’t make any difference so my answer is still, “so what?”

You just don't want to recognize it. There are no examples of any two things that are absolutely identical, and therefore there are no examples of any two things that are absolutely "equal", either.

Sure they are, you take a penny that weighs 2.4 grams and you can exchange it at the bank for a penny that weighs 2.432 grams at the bank, they might look at you funny for wasting their time but they are still monetarily equal. They are also equal in unit value. Both are still one penny when evaluated alone. You add them together, you get two.

Absoluteness is an ideal that we can't verify through reality.

Wrong. One penny plus another penny is two pennies absolutely. One cent plus another cent is two cents, absolutely.

No two pennies are exactly alike, and are therefore not exactly equal.

Equal in what, weight? Therefore not equal in value? Wrong.

Absolute equalities do exist, your red hearing here is failing miserably.

We simply accept them as equal within the parameters of variability that we apply to pennies. The pennies are only equal relative to the parameters of variability that we apply to them. They are not absolutely equal, they are only relatively equal. And this is true of any other two objects you care to name.

We accept them as equal because they are equal, they are equal because we accept them as equal. Who cares whether the chicken or the egg comes first in regards to the penny? The fact that there are peripheral differences in the objects doesn’t negate our ability to see them in isolation (as a single penny) and then notice the demonstrated accuracy of a mathematical equation when they are combined numerically becoming two pennies.

You don't have any evidence at all of any two things being absolutely equal.

In what? Absolutely equal in what, PureX? I have an example of two pennies being absolutely equal in two examples.
1. They are absolutely equal in monetary value.
2. They are both easily recognized as being equal in their singleness. (In otherwords when don’t say that one penny is more of a penny because it weighs more, it is still one penny.)
If you don’t believe me, then prove your argument correct? Show us! Show me that somehow, that because all pennies don’t weigh the same, that some pennies are less than one unit in a category of pennies and some are more, and then tell us which are more and which are less.

Or even better. What is the monetary value of these two pennies if not 2 cents? Show us how the pennies' relative weights affects the absolute outcome in a measurable way concerning the monetary value of the penny.

The only place absolute equality exists that you can know of, is in your mind.

Well now this is a crazy argument, the only way that relative inequality can exist as a concept is in your mind as well. So what? Pennies don’t compare the weight of themselves…. It take a mind to call them equal or unequal, so your argument here fails the uniqueness test.

You aren't debating the substance of what I'm saying, you're just presenting distractions, mostly.

I’m always open for you to straighten me out if you think I have misrepresented your argument.

But please note that my disagreeing with you is not the same thing as misrepresenting you..
Now I said:

:
Originally posted by BChristianK Well if we don’t define radicalism by the extremity of action taken then I don’t know how to define it.

You replied:

But I wasn't discussing radicalism, I was discussing fundamentalism. And I was not basing my definition of fundamentalism on behavior, I was basing it on the attitude of the fundamentalist toward doctrine rather than the substance of the doctrines they hold.

And that behavior is what? Fundamentalists are convinced of what they believe and therefore live by those convictions? This being contrasted with non-fundamentalists who apparently aren’t really convinced of the substance of the doctrines they hold but live their lives by those convictions anyway?

Not all fundamentalists are radicals, and not all are violent. But by my definition of fundamentalism, they all have an obsession with the idea of their own righteousness that can easily become radically extreme and/or violent.

And how do you know that they are obsessed with the idea of their own righteousness?
And furthermore, if you would please, explain to me the difference between holding a conviction and being obsessed with their own rightousness.

Maybe you come close in the next statement…

There is a difference between believing that we are right about something, and believing that we are absolutely right about something. The difference is that in the first case we understand that there is always the possibility that even though we think we are right, that we are actually wrong.

Ok, I am assuming you then would have some form of differentiation.

So lets take your theory about no two things being equal…

An ignorant statement would be one in which the chance you were wrong outweighs the possibility that you are right.
A risky statement would be one in which the chance you are wrong and the possibility you are right are roughly equal.
A confident statement is one in which the chance you are right is greater than the possibility that you are wrong.

Which one of these is your theory about no two things being absolutely equal? Lets subject that claim to some metrics.

Is this a confident statement, a risky one or an ignorant one?


And, substantiate how we know that it is confident, risky or ignorant.

And by the way, you can’t use the argument that your claim is “self-evident” because if it were self evident then the proof would overshadow any possibility of it being wrong and then it would be absolute. Remember if you believe an absolute statement, you are a fundamentalist, and that would make your argument hypocritical.

Now since you started you post off with……

It is self-evident that no two things are absolutely identical.

You have some serious backtracking to do….

I’ll continue on another post

 

[BChristianK]

Continued From above




Now you say:

The difference is that I understand that I can be wrong even when I think I'm right. This is exactly the characteristic that fundamentalists lack. If you lack this ability, you are a fundamentalist, if you possess this ability, you are not a fundamentalist. That is what I am saying.

What ability, the ability to understand that we could be wrong concerning what?

In answering another post you said:

Fundamentalists don't have to be absolutely right about everything, but they do have to be absolutely right about the essentials of whatever ideology they have adopted. Religious fundamentalists, for example, have to be absolutely right about the nature and existence of God, often including God's will for themselves and everyone else.

Clete answered you quite adeptly saying:

However, I do freely and boldly admit that ALL of my beliefs about not only God but everything else must be falsifiable or they are altogether meaningless. If, for example, you could show that Jesus did in fact die and stay dead, that the resurrection is false, then you will have, in one stroke, completely dismantled the entire Christian faith. That's a pretty big 'if' but it is an 'if' all the same and the payoff for having accomplished it is equally as big. And that's only one of dozens of ways in which one could falsify all or part of the Christian world view.

You answered by saying:

You seem to have a very twisted idea of the concept of "falsifiable". If Preston the Prestidigitator does a magic card trick for you, and "reads your mind", do you assume that he really read your mind until someone can prove to you that he did not? I doubt that you will.

No, he probably wouldn’t for good reason. The question is, is there any evidence that would convince Clete to accept Preston’s ability to read his mind? If he answers no, then his belief isn’t falsifiable, if he answers yes, then it is.
You continue:

Yet the bible tells you that Jesus performed magical feats and you assume that they must be real until someone can prove to you that they are not. Why this inconsistency in your skepticism?

No, he is simply stating that his belief is falsifiable, that it is not absolute, no matter what. If anyone can provide sufficient evidence that the claims of Christianity are false, then, per Cletes admission, he will stop believing it. Let’s review PureX since you seem to be wandering a bit.

Your claim is that fundamentalists are dangerous because they can’t admit that they could be wrong under any circumstances. Clete has refuted your argument by describing circumstances in which he would admit that he was wrong.
Your whining about how you perceive those circumstances to be unfair are peripheral to the fact that, unfair or not, they are still circumstances in which the fundamentalist would admit that they are incorrect. So even if the circumstances aren’t a fair evaluation, and I am about to argue that they are, you are still off base in your diagnostics of fundamentalism, for even an unfair exception is still an exception.

However, Cletes provisio isn’t that unfair anyway. The bible provides 4 independent accounts from authors who were willing to put their lives on the line to publish documents that could get them crucified and they all substantiating the reality of the resurrection. You have no contemporary documentation saying, “Ha!, you Christians are crazy, we’ve got Jesus’s decaying body right here!” In fact, you have Jewish authorities making fabricated arguments that the disciples stole the body. Now that makes a lot of sense , the disciples, stole the body, fabricated a story about his resurrection, and then went to their deaths defending a lie that they knew wasn’t true because they invented it. And not one of the 10 of them that were martyred cracked and said, Yeah, we were just kiddin’” The alternative explanation to the accuracy of these accounts is proposterous!

So you have the substantiation of credibility for each of the authors and cross referenced accuracy of the events by all the sources of the gospels, coupled with a noticeable absence of any contradictory evidence. The case is pretty tight.

Thus, Clete, based on that evidence, concludes that the example of Preston and the example of Jesus are as equal as comparing the battle of Gettysburg to the battle of the network stars. The metrics of his falsifiability are right on.

Could it be that you WANT to believe in Jesus' feats of magic, but you don't want to believe in Preston's feats of magic, so you've simply accepted one and denied the other out of pure selfish bias?

Could it be that you WANT to believe in your theory about fundamentalists but you DON”T WANT to believe that you are wrong?
Probably.
Should we therefore ignore the evidence just because you want to be right?
That would be crazy.

Lets say that Clete does want to believe the bible is true, does that make it any less true, does that somehow make the evidence any less compelling?

No.

And now that you have accepted Jesus' feats of magic as real, what evidence would you require as the "falsification" of your beliefs?

I thought he was pretty clear here.

Is such evidence even physically or humanly obtainable?

Yes, documentary evidence that Jesus didn’t rise.

And if it's not (and I suspect it is not), aren't you really just 'stacking the deck' against falsification so that it can't possibly occur?

It would have been simple to provide falsifiable evidence denying the resurrection, just open the tomb and show us a dead Jesus. The reason the gospels were written was because the resurrection wasn’t falsified. Furthermore, if you want to make Clete and the rest of us prove that our theories are contemporarily falsifiable, then produce for us a reliable manuscript that contradicts the conclusions the four gospel writers made about the resurrection.

And isn't that just more selfish bias?

Nope. I don’t know about Clete, but I converted from Atheism. I didn’t exactly want to give up the kind of lifestyle I was living.

So how honest are you really being with us and with yourself when you claim that your mind is open to the possibility that you might be wrong regarding the nature and existence of God?

Pretty darn honest

How honest are you being with yourself and others when you make your hasty generalizations about fundamentalism?

Grace and Peace

 

[Duder]

BCK -

Perhaps PureX's point is related to the idea that all "things" are arbitrary. The very concept of "thing-ness" is slippery. Let me explain.

I take all the change out of my pocket, and I can easily seperate the pennies from the other coins. That is because pennies have a similar shape, and there are similar patterns stamped on them.

Now I take two pennies and examine them under a magnifying glass. I can see differences between the two pennies - little irregularities between the two coins. But I say they are both pennies because without the glass they look the same.

I take one of the pennies and bang on it with a hammer for a minute. Then I place it beside the other penny and compare them again. The differences are greater, but the banged-up penny is still a penny. I can still read the writing, and make out the shapes that make it look more or less like the nice, mint penny.

So next I take the banged-up penny and let a train run over it, and then again compare it to the mint penny. Do I still have two pennes? Hard to tell at this point. I can kind of make out Lincoln's head, but the whole shape is wildly different now, and I would probably have difficulty spending this object as a penny.

So now I subject the squashed penny to the heat of a torch and I melt in into a indiscriminate mass. When I again set it next to the mint penny for comparison, do I still have two pennes? At this point I'm inclined to say no, I do not have two pennies. The differences between these two objects are too great.

Where did I cross the line and destroy the penny's penniness? I slowly increased the differences between the pennies, and at some point I arbitrarily decided that this object was no longer the same kind of object. Exacly when I crossed that line is a matter of debate - not all will agree.

So I guess PureX is saying that what makes a thing this kind of thing instead of that kind of thing is a matter of choice - and not really an essence in the object.

 

[BChristianK]

Duder said:

Where did I cross the line and destroy the penny's penniness?

Good question, and a well thought out point. I don’t have the slightest clue when it stopped being a penny.

But how does that affect the concept that 1 penny plus another one equals 2 pennies.

Lets say I took the cooled mass of copper along with 99 pennies into a bank. I might have a problem getting the cashier to exchange them for a dollar because of the melted penny.

So what is the nature of my dispute with the cashier? That 100 pennies equal a dollar?

No, that absolute principle is still agreed upon, what we disagree on is whether the melted thing is a penny.

You said:

So I guess PureX is saying that what makes a thing this kind of thing instead of that kind of thing is a matter of choice - and not really an essence in the object.

Which may or may night affect the nature of an absolute statement. In the case of the monetary value of a penny, it does not.

Grace and Peace

 

[temple2006]

You people (the fundamentalists) cannot understand that for human beings everything is faith , not absolute knowledge. The only thing that we know is that we do not know, therefore we must believe.

 

[PureX]

Originally posted by BChristianK Here is the beginning of an invalid conclusion. You’ll attempt to argue from this that because no two things can be absolutely equal in every way, then no two things added together can be absolutely 2.

*sigh* First of all, "two" is a concept, not an object. Things are things and conceptions about things are conceptions about things. The things never become our concept of them; they remain what they are.

Absolute equality is a concept that we can imagine in our minds but that doesn't really exist materially. We can apply this concept to things, but only by ignoring the aspects of those things that fall outside the perameters of the concept. We imagine that two pennies are "equal" but we are ignoring the fact they they are not exactly the same, and so are not really equal in many ways. We say they are equal but their equality only holds true if we ignore the ways in which they are not equal. What this means that they are really only relatively equal. They are equal only relative to our excusing the ways in which they are not the same.

Originally posted by BChristianK You can have a penny, lets say it weighs about 2.4 grams (round figure) and then take another penny, and for some reason this one is a bit odd, it isn’t perfectly round and it has tarnished, it weighs about 2.2 grams (for some reason, tarnished pennies weigh less, who knew?). You put them on the scale and they weigh 4.6 grams together. You do the same experiment with two other pennies and you get 4.75 grams. Can you conclude that not all pennies are equal then?

It doesn't matter what the pennies weigh, or what their weights add up to. Even if their combined weights are the same, they will still be different in other ways from any other two pennies. And anyway, if we calebrate our scale progressively closer, at some point the pennies won't weight the exact same anymore. Even their "equal weight" is only equal relative to the degree of calibration involved.

Originally posted by BChristianK Nope. You must qualify your statement. You can claim that they are unequal in regard to weight. You can’t claim that they are unequal in regard to monetary value.

Exactly, so their equality only holds true relative to the scale of monetary values we are applying to them. And relative equality can't by definition be absolute equality. This is what I've been trying to get you to understand all along. Absolute equality only exists as an ideal in your mind. In the real material world, the application of the conception of equality will only function relatively - that is relative to a scale of values that ignores the ways in which all things vary.

Originally posted by BChristianK Nor can you claim that they are not equally identifiable and individual units of the category entitled penny.

Here, you are confusing the concept of the objects with the objects themselves. Pennies are not ideas, and ideas are not pennies.

Originally posted by BChristianK PureX, you and I both know that if you take the first two pennies and add them together, ya still get two cents. You can get two penny candies and you still need 98 pennies, regardless of the weight, to make a dollar.

Yes, this is a relative truism. That is it remains true relative to the scale of truthfulness being applied. But if we refined the scale, this will no longer be true. Thus it is a relative truth.

Originally posted by BChristianK So when you say that no two pennies are alike in every way, I say, “So what?”. The fact that they aren’t the same in every way doesn’t even come close to proving that they don’t equal two pennies.

Again, you're forgetting that pennies are objects, and that equality is an idea. Just because you ignore this distinction does not make the distinction irrelevant, and it certainly doesn't negate it. The fact is that no two pennies are exactly alike, and therefor they can't be absolutely equal. Just because we often ignore this fact doesn't make it not be a fact anymore. And if this fact wasn't important, why are you devoting so much energy to these long posts desperately trying to negate it?

Originally posted by BChristianK I have an example of two pennies being absolutely equal in two examples.
1. They are absolutely equal in monetary value.
2. They are both easily recognized as being equal in their singleness. (In otherwords when don’t say that one penny is more of a penny because it weighs more, it is still one penny.)
If you don’t believe me, then prove your argument correct? Show us! Show me that somehow, that because all pennies don’t weigh the same, that some pennies are less than one unit in a category of pennies and some are more, and then tell us which are more and which are less.

Your idea of a penny is such that one penny "equals" any other. But the reality of the pennies is that they are not the same at all. They actually differ in many ways and by many degrees. Now you're trying to claim that because the reality of their variation doesn't effect the functionality of your idea, that your idea is somehow "absolute". Apparently you don't understand the meaning of the word "absolute".

The definition of "absolute" means that it's not dependant upon or relative to anything else. But the equality of pennies IS dependant upon our ignoring all the ways in which pennies are not alike. Pennies are only relatively equal in size, weight, shape, material content, color, surface design, etc. In reality all these characteristics of pennies are different. We have to ignore all these differences to call these pennies equal, and therefor their "equality" is dependant upon our doing so. Thus, they can't by the definition of the word "absolute" be absolutely equal.

Originally posted by BChristianK Or even better. What is the monetary value of these two pennies if not 2 cents? Show us how the pennies' relative weights affects the absolute outcome in a measurable way concerning the monetary value of the penny.

Just because we all agree to ignore the difference between pennies, and to consider them equal in value does not make them "absolutely equal". It only makes them equal relative to our aggreeing to ignore how they are not the same.

Most of your argument/confusion seems to come from the fact that you are having difficulty understanding the difference between the objects we call "penies" and your ideas about pennies. In your mind they are equal so you keep insisting that they are equal in reality, too.

But they aren't.

 

[temple2006]

Apparently everyone has me on their ignore list, but I just have to comment on the stupidity of the things you people argue about. These things are self-evident to the thinking man.