Undue, forceful, misguiding or hypnotic preaching is also considered a violence in Jainism. Its natural growth is anticipated. This can be a reason that it remained within natural limits. Moreover, such origional, A&F, natural things though healthful but may not be liked due to odd preceptions currently.
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Gratitude, Compulsion, Idiocy or Nobility?
- Thread starter Kumar
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Undue, forceful, misguiding or hypnotic preaching is also considered a violence in Jainism. Its natural growth is anticipated. This can be a reason that it remained within natural limits. Moreover, such origional, A&F, natural things though healthful but may not be liked due to odd preceptions currently.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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Telling us that this guy became omniscient is "misguiding"
He didn't
He didn't
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Sorry, but I showed that Bhagchandra Jain was wrong in his assessment of science and of Jainism's validation according to science. You had no response, and indeed tried to whip out a Jain code of conduct that said you didn't need to respond (but that you somehow got credit for rebutting it). Bhagchandra Jain has clearly "misguided" Jains as to the validity of their religion according to mainstream science. Further, a code of conduct that prohibits discussing the errors of Jain teachers is pretty "hypnotic." (We agreed, I recall, that that meant brainwashing.)
I await a sign of your contrition.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
The side effects of religion are present even if it is great, beneficial and benevolent, and the negative side effects of real religions in real history as practiced by real people are large and significant. You cannot continue to deny the reality of reality simply by redefining terms to suit your distorted viewpoint. You cannot wave away the side effects of religions as they are actually practiced by simply applying the "no true Scotsman" fallacy every time the truth does not suit you (look that one up if you don't know what is meant here. It's a common term, and extremely applicable here). You cannot say one or the other religion is practiced badly or misused when the people doing so know enormously, vastly, incalculably more than you do about them. You have proven yourself repeatedly to be utterly ignorant of the content or teaching of most religions, and of the facts of history. A wave of your magical wand does not change this.
You can, if you wish, with no objection from many here, assert that those other religions are wrong. All practitioners of a religion will say that others are wrong, and a privilege of religious faith is to do so. You can not, though, assert that practitioners of those other religions are practicing them wrong, unless you evince a far greater knowledge of their tenets and beliefs than you have so far shown. This is important and not trivial and not just words. When you purport to know how to practice religions other than your own better than popes, imams, bishops and the most famous theologians of history, you are swimming not only out of your depth, but sharing the pool with sharks and dragons.
And no, you did not prove anything. You stated some things. Even if those things were right, that does make your statements a proof.
You continue to confuse ideas.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Did you suddenly become a qualified scientist in the past week, such that you can tell the world authoritatively how science arrives at its conclusion? So far both you and Bhagchandra Jain are happy to spew all sorts of wild statements about things you don't know anything about. Is such ignorant pontification common in Jainism? The science that is well understood is well understood because it has been subjected to as many proofs as its practitioners can think of. We don't reproduce the proof everywhere we talk about the conclusion, but that's because it's assumed the student is well aware with the proofs, not because there aren't any or none were needed. The basic tenets of scientific inquiry, the hypothetico-deductive method (often informally called the "scientific method") is ninety-nine percent concerned with coming up with proofs that don't commit various errors in collecting information and inferring conclusions from it. You're trying to tell us it's no different than the propositional knowledge that forms the apex of the Jain model of knowledge.
You're claiming Jainism has been validated by science. The only bit of actual argument you could show for that -- and it wasn't even your argument -- was flat-out wrong and not more than a little bit arrogant. And here you are still frantically trying to change the subject so that you don't have to talk about it.
For crying out loud, you got caught red-handed asking loaded questions that had nothing to do with science. Are you still trying to win?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You mean that thing that was an oral tradition for centuries until its monks finally learned how to write? Gee, no possibility for error or distortion there.
Straw man. You may have been inculcated to believe that inferential knowledge is inferior, as it occupies a lowly place in the Jain model of knowledge. But it's how the rest of the world works -- you know, the world that exists outside the tiny bubble of Jainism. And it's how you operate too, as we showed in your other thread. My recollection of Jainism is that no more perfectly omniscient people will ever come about, therefore everyone is stuck with inferential knowledge -- even all the Jains. Your "A&F" is based on a pie-in-the-sky model of omniscience that isn't even widely preached among the other dharmists and doesn't offer any hope for the only kind of proof you seem to want to accept.
Yes, we can make historical inquiries via inferential knowledge and come up with a conclusion as to the likelihood certain things existed or happened. But as I wrote before, your summary of Mahavira mixes inconsequential demographic claims with religious attributions that simply have no evidence to support them. They are entirely fantastical and divorced from any kind of observable reality. You don't get to casually pass those off as if they are as innocent as when he was born and where he lived.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
And how. Buckle up, Kumar. You're about to see how a real logical analysis proceeds.
The question at hand is whether Jainism is a scientific religion, by which we mean whether pertinent claims are confirmed by mainstream findings arrived at by the hypothetico-deductive model and presented with appropriate empiricism. You, Kumar, have tried to conflate that with whether Jainism imparts subjective benefit. (You have widened this to include other religious, but as you admitted knowing little about other religions -- and demonstrated as much -- we can stipulate that any argument toward universality on this point would fail as badly as the last time you tried it, and for the same reasons. Hence we restrict the inquiry to Jainism.)
Classical logic sees three related shades of the same distractive fallacy. The first and most straightforward is known as a Red Herring fallacy, named for the historical practice of using the smell of rotting fish to mask odors and thus confuse predators. This tactic has become widespread in American politics as reported in the media. A politician who does not wish to answer a question posed to him will try to pivot, or turn the question to something else that has a more favorable answer but is only slightly related to the original question. You pivoted from the question of scientific validity to a separate question of subjective benefit. The science is where you're in over your head. Subjective value is trivially true for most religions.
The second (and third) is described by the term I applied -- loaded question. A question is "loaded" in English rhetorical terminology when it is based on an unjustified, unstated proposition. We can find a number of unstated propositions that fit your evident intent. I picked two. The first is on the Bruto just outlined -- stipulating that a religion engenders faith does not agree that that's a good thing, nor that it covers the whole experience of religion (the side-effects Bruto mentioned). Further stipulating that a religion produces euphoria, gives a person a sense of spiritual well-being, or motivates him to do good attempts to stand up these ideals as proxies for the original question (scientific validity) which they certainly are not. The false hidden premises are that faith and subjective approval are equivalent to scientific validity.
Bhagchandra made specific claims about Jainism and science. These are not at all relevant to general allegations of subjective benefit. They are, in part, (1) Dharma is confirmed by the aetheric model of transmission, (2) plant autonomics as observed by Chandra Bain are proof of the Jain claim that plants have souls and experience human emotions, (3) vegetarian and ascetic diets have medical justification, (4) Jainism explains certain kinds of atomic bonds, (5) boiling water without killing the microbes makes it safe to drink. None of these are the least affected by vague generalities as whether Jainism compels its followers to have faith or whether it brings them good spiritual feelings to compels them toward good works. That's a complete non sequitur.
Take a hypothetical religion whose members grow food and use it to feed hungry people who otherwise would be unable to eat. Clearly that's an objectively laudable belief. The religion may go on to believe that in performing this selfless act, they will be rewarded in some way by nature or by a deity. While it may cast a selfish shadow over their actions, it is nevertheless a defensible line of reasoning as long as one accepts arguendo the existence of the rewarding entity. If a critic chooses not to believe in the rewarding entity, he would at least be constrained -- as you have tried to constrain your critics -- to accept that end result is not only subjectively desirable but optimistically altruistic. But if this religion also preached that the Earth was flat, that chalk was sentient, and that beer should be drunk instead of water, secular knowledge has somewhat to say on each of those items.
The shape of the earth has been observed directly. There is no legitimate controversy about it. That claim on the part of that religion would simply be factually wrong. The best we could say about chalk is that it doesn't exhibit any of the signs we have come to recognize systematically as evidence of sentience. In science, the null hypothesis would not be falsified on the question of sentient chalk, so we would be justified in rejecting the claim as at worst unproven and at best unlikely.
Drinking beer instead of water brings to mind many possible lines of reasoning. That's because "better" has to be more precisely defined, and most religions don't precisely define the relative operators in their moral calculus. In the west, drinking beer was better than water for many centuries because of the uncertainty of the water supply. Causing it to contain enough alcohol to dispatch the harmful microbes was better than dying of tainted water. But with the advent of reliable water and other methods of purification, the relative benefits of beer wane in comparison to its side effects such as excessive carbohydrate content and alcohol intoxication. Whereas before those were tolerable side effects, they may not be in all subsequent cases. This brings up a cause for a few religious proscriptions -- they once may have had a practical use, but were taught as propositional knowledge to simple people.
Now that we've seen how the spectrum of inferential knowledge can interact with claims made by religion, we introduce two steps of indirection.
Let's say a scholar in our hypothetical religion names the beliefs above and claims that mainstream science has confirmed each one. That is a separate claim. For each doctrine, the prefix "Science has confirmed that..." is a separately testable claim, whether or not the doctrine is also testable. "Science has confirmed that the earth is flat," would be a -- pardon the pun -- flat-out lie. Science has emphatically and conclusively confirmed exactly the opposite. "Science has confirmed that chalk is sentient," would also be a lie if the claimant could provide no references, or provided only references to where scientists had observed some property of chalk that the religious scholar then separately tried to conclude must be the product of sentience. (We see this all the time in fringe argumentation -- some authority's work is held up as confirmation when it is the fringe claimant, not the authority, who draws the conclusion of confirmation.) It is vitally important, when considering alleged endorsements, whether the authority or the claimant is the one drawing the conclusion.
A related error occurs when science has a reasonably conclusive finding on a subject that is only superficially related to a doctrine. Religions will often overstate the similarities or suggest a contributive factor that just isn't true. The fallacy of limited depth is common.
"Science has confirmed that drinking beer is preferable to water," is at best a distortion. As we discussed relative to history, there once may have been a case where beer is preferable to tainted water, but that qualification would not have arisen at a time when all water was presumed to be tainted. At best you would say that the religious commentator here had oversimplified a complex issue and was remiss in not noting science's cause-and-effect analysis of beer's detriments. Cherry-picking the science is a common way religions make this claim on issues that are less clear-cut according to present knowledge.
Here's the next step of indirection. If we investigate the origin story of the religion and discover that these doctrines were handed down to a mortal named Steve who was taken aboard a spaceship from faraway planet Kolob by the extraterrestrial Criswell and connected to an infinitely indexed memory bank, thus rendering him omniscient, it's surprising how little of the religion's doctrines are helped by that. First, it does no good to point out that Steve was born in Tampa, Florida on June 8, 1953 and played high school football at a stadium that exists. Those aren't the interesting parts of Steve's story. The interesting part is where he was abducted by aliens and magically made omniscient. Chances are, Steve's followers can tell you the story in great detail, but can't give you a scrap of evidence that it actually occurred. They sneak the controversial parts of Steve's story under your radar by burying it alongside inconsequential, verifiable facts. The reader is meant to assume they're all equally verifiable. Again this is a hallmark of American political writing too.
My earlier reference to J.R.R. Tolkien was no accident. Tolkien has amassed a gigantic mythos of the world in which he told his well-known stories. It is excruciatingly detailed and remarkably self-consistent. Many stories can be -- and have been -- told within its borders. Many people are aware of it and can exchange knowledge from it. Except, of course, that none of it is true. It's entirely made-up. This is what much of religion is like. It wants to supplant detail and common knowledge over the top of factual veracity.
And Steve's well-known but entirely unverifiable story of omniscience really doesn't do much to help the doctrines. If Steve omnisciently tells us the earth is flat, he's just wrong. His claim to omniscience is forfeit. (Jainism maintains that no amount of inferential reasoning is considered a refutation of omniscience. That's a red flag.) It doesn't really help the claim of sentient chalk. Steve may have engendered the faith of his followers to believe that chalk is sentient, and he can offer up the explanation that Criswell's infinitely-indexed memory bank told him so and that science just hasn't caught up yet. But that's not going to budge the presumption that sentient chalk is unlikely. The conviction is based on other premises that are also unproven and equally implausible. You're just trading one implausible thing for another.
As for beer, perhaps Criswell's infinitely-indexed memory bank really does know some other overriding benefit to beer that makes it superior to water in all respects. Since the science responds to the ambiguous "it's better" with "it depends," we aren't really out of the margins of rational thought here. On this point we'd have to wait until the ambiguity is resolved.
But if we consider the derivative claims, "Science has confirmed that..." we see that the allegations of omniscience are utterly refractory to the truth of those claims. There is no amount of claimed omniscience that corrects observable conditions of fact. If science is observably adamant that the world isn't flat, Criswell's magic spell over Steve can't possibly change that observation. Not the observation of the world, but the observation of what science has concluded.
Kumar, you've gone so far down the Jain rabbit hole that you have essentially denied that there can be any actual right or wrong answers.
In the Jain model of knowledge, inferential knowledge is that which combines observation with existing knowledge. If we see a fire from far away, we know propositionally that it will be hot because of our past experience with fire, but we don't have sensory knowledge of it. Someone who is close to the fire will experience the heat from it and have a sure knowledge of it. But what happens when we observe things at a distance whose properties we are unsure of? We will make educated guesses, but they risk being wrong. Only someone who has intimate proximal experience with those observed things will come closer to knowing their true nature. Dharmic omniscience is akin to that level of knowledge applied to all states of affairs.
Where Kumar errs is, analogously, in looking at a red-hot electric stove burner and vigorously telling people it's an unknown object, and that one can only determine its effect by touching it. He looks at scientific findings and assumes them to be these unknown quantities such that Bhagchandra Jain can mention them and not be refuted by anyone who doesn't have that sensory knowledge of them. And who does? No one, in Kumar's formulation. But in reality every scientist has that knowledge. It is entirely possible to have sufficient knowledge of Chandra Bose's work on plant physiology to know from afar that it doesn't support Bhagchandra's claims about it. Kumar may not know anything about it, and on that basis it would be foolish for him to rely on inferential speculation. But he doesn't get to say that because he doesn't know anything about it, no one can. Other people may have experience with red-hot stove burners and regard Kumar's demands that it must be unknowable as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Kumar is warping the Jain model of knowledge to appear to justify his own considerable ignorance.
If you've suffered with me this far, you deserve a beer. On Criswell.
Sórry, yoú had just made gróss refutatión neíther accurate nor A&F. You have also avoided my response on first point. Anyway, now nothing hold any logic, when I proved it by two point justifícatión with A&F. You agree or not on it, it will still hold full value and I need not to care you because you avoided true response to my questions. A&F means benéfits withoút any undue side effect which religion hold but science do not hóld. We therefore get different opínions, different tréatments, different outcones on any conventíónal treatments because it is not A&F.
Its consitent existance in mass peóple backed by history and benefits without undue side affects are A&F proofs of its validity. Nothing can jústify it as false. So no úse to doubt it and compare an A&F thing with a non A&F inferiór thing. People cry in odd preceptión and in irratiónal egoistic odd scepticism can not degrade or invalídate it.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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No reason for anyone but the brainwashed to believe your claims. No one has ever been omniscient, except in your fairy tales
I think, we underestimate óur true self. We have become góld ore from gold. But forget that we can still bécome gold be removing admixtures and attachments. Every being in its true gold form become highly valued abd infinité.
Filippo Lippi
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What are the features of "true gold form? How does one achieve it? What are "admixtures and attachments," be specific?
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Tell me about side effects from true religions practiced by true peoplr, as you claimed above.
No one can deny scientifiç benefiting affects by keeping faith and by religious practíces are there. So it is lie in odd preceptión that religións have no scientific basis. Otherwise, if there would had been no religión, we would had vanished by this time. When children had no fear and control of parents, they become odd.
God levél is not poor but poors beg to hím to bless and rémove their povérty. Yoú can also beg. When omniscient and A&F, thóúgh he seé all but can chóose ríght ones not liké non A&F ones, whó can not and even can misguide.
Free from all Karma bóndings, cause & effects . Only remain Dharma or true religión like pure góld vs gold ore.
jond
Illuminator
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Entirely made up nonsense. Devoid of fact. (No key caps on iPad.)
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You were invited to prove that, but you declined citing claims that it would be against your religion to do so.
Your response was that you were not obligated to address my refutation, but you thought you should still be given credit anyway for what you claimed you could do had you chosen to respond.
I've addressed your two loaded questions at extreme length. No, they don't prove I was wrong. No, they don't prove Bhagchandra Jain was right. They prove only that you haven't the faintest idea how a logical argument is supposed to go.
A&F is a red herring.
Bhagchandra Jain was factually wrong regarding his scientific claims.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No, not it's scientific validity as claimed by Bhagchandra Jain. You're trying to move the goalposts.
The facts do. But you are so steeped in Jainism's broken model of knowledge -- again, not even accepted by other dharmists who outnumber you a hundred to one -- that you reject even observable facts.
No, your critics are not just egotists or brainwashers.
Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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Karma is a nonsense, dharma are platitudes
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Keeping faith in a religion and being motivated by it to practices that, according to some, bring good has absolutely nothing to do with scientific validity. Faith, in fact, is the absence of science. Scientific validity is achieved by rigid attention to observable fact and logically valid inference.
You are not a scientist and you know only of your tiny religion, not any others. You are hardly the authority on whether religion has a scientific basis. But no matter, you have claimed that faith and good works constitute scientific validity, such as of the specific claims put forward by Bhangchandra Jain. That is simply a fantasy. Those concepts -- either specifically or generally -- have nothing to do with each other.
What evidence shows this?
What evidence shows that religion is the only means by which parents can control their children?