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0 pointsdragonwriter12y ago0 comments

> Religion is bullshit for bullshits sake.

I'd rather strongly disagree with that. Because it appeals to a form of justification which makes verifiability in any decisive sense largely impossible, it is a fertile venue for "bullshit" (in the terms used in the article) -- and for the same reason, for "liars", which the article distinguishes -- but it is not, either in principle or in practice, either exclusively bullshit nor "for bullshits sake". The purposes of bullshitting, lying, or truth-telling in religion are pretty much the same as they are in any other venue.

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fit2rule12y ago· 1 in thread

I think the point is that once a religion stops being bullshit, it becomes a science.

dragonwriterOP12y ago

That simply doesn't work with the definitions in the article. If you are using BS to mean anything that's not taking an exclusively empirical approach to explore exclusively questions of objective fact -- which its pretty clear that some people do -- then, sure, that's tautologically true. But that's a completely different definition than is used in the article, so its not relevant.

Both truth telling and lying (both of which the article distinguishes from BS), as defined in the article, are quite possible in domains where the questions aren't subject to scientific exploration. Whether those domains are meaningful is a philosophical question orthogonal to the truth/lie/BS distinction that the article makes, though.

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