Faith-healing-bunk

When the Amazing Randi and his team investigated faith-healing claims, he found fraud. Some faith-healers obtain information beforehand about a client, and some during a performance by using head-sets.The information made the showman look authoritative!

 When his team did follow-up research on the claimed cases, none were successful unless misdiagnosed, misunderstood by the client or remissions- always natural  phenomena Some died because of rejecting medical attention or it was just too emotional for them.

When parents and guardians use faith-healing at the expense of childten, we should prosecute them; their rights prevail over the rights  of the other two.

And exorsicism can cause grave harm. Exorcism should be banned

What faith-based matters irk you? What might be positive about faith-matters?

Science invalidates prayer, the ad hoc- coincidence when answered and the rationalizaton when unanswered.One can meditate otherwise. As with miracles, as David hume notes, prayers of different religions contradict each other. Or as an inclusivist, do you feel that all relgions affirm both prayers and miracles?

 

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Hume- the magnificent naturalist!

David Hume insists that one uses the empirical method- use facts- rather than unfounded intuitions, religious traditions, revelations and holy books.  In this manner, people lead themselves to that more abundant life, Those others are non-starters, parasites on the presumption of empiricism!
 The presumption of naturalism requires that we acknowledge that not only are causes and explanations necessary and efficient, they are also primary and sufficient; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz notwithstanding, they themselves are the sufficient reason. They are that Necessary Being as it were1
 Hume and Immanuel Kant remain the top philosophers to keel haul supernaturalist arguments,albeit Kant himself has the ridiculous moral one. Carneades, a pre-Socratic one, keel hauls supernaturalism, and all others are his expanded footnote!
 Before Hume's devastating attack on teleological arguments, Carneades in response to Chrysippus  notes that the latter begs the question of the word builder in his analogy of the builder of houses with the more than human one of the Universe.The neutral verb form is forms.Why presume that homes and the universe are comparable.
 And as Hume brings up the problem  of evil, Carneades inquires what would the about to be grilled pig think of the greater good defense?
Hume use the dysteleological argument - from imperfections- in eviscerating teleological arguments.
 Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig, notwithstanding, we find no personal explanation in any supernaturalist argument for His existence. Is it an incompetent God, a committee of gods, a manner like vegetation or some other manner. Otherwise one begs the question and uses the argument from ignorance.
  To the viewers of this blog, please respond yea or nay in part or in whole at whatever length  you so desire. It is for serious inquirers. As a fallibilist, I must admit that we naturalists can err!

Hume that grand empiricist, humanist and naturalist

David Hume advocates the presumption of naturalism in effect that natural causes and explanations are not only necessary and  efficient but also primary and sufficient. They are the Necessary Beings and the Primary Causes, contradicting  Aquinas with the former and Leibniz with the latter. This hardly begs the question as it is no more than the honest demand for evidence as Einstein used evidence to overcome Newton. 
Before his dementia, Antony Garrard Newton Flew advocated this presumption , but under the influence  of an obscurantist science writer and his dementia , he forgot that Nature only reveals natural causes and answers as this presumption is akin to the presumption of innocence in the law , and Aquinas alluded to implicitly in making his five failed arguments.
 Home advocates the presumption of empiricism that forbids revelations, religious traditions,  unfounded intuitions and  folk psychology.
  He furthered the case against the existence of God that Carneades started.
 He and Thomas Hobbes advocate wide- reflective subjectivism that  of overriding mere whims with  the reasoned moral sense. I contend that  that underpins, paradoxically, objective morality!
 He  reasons that compatibilism - soft determinism - rules rather than contra-causal  free will. That is, we have causes -determinants from our heredity and environment that cause our free actions.
 My terminal shyness and slight paranoia causes me to seek therapy, thereby establishing new causes. And as Democritus notes, causes don't coerce us. Without causes, we'd be at the mercy of randomness, the inverse of what many think.
 And Hume was a historian.
 I wonder what my viewers have to maintain about any part of this, to which they can comment at whatever length they so desire.

Ignostic Morgan -Carneades: Ignostic Morgan Carneades

Ignostic Morgan -Carneades: Ignostic Morgan Carneades: "Carneades was the first ignostic. He found that the Epicureans and the Stoics just shot hot air with their definiion of the gods as applicab..."

David Hume- atheologian- naturalist

David Hume is the hero of us humanists and naturalists. He eviscerates somewhat supernaturalism as Carneades does. He deals in reality against those poseurs of the silly supercilious superstition of religion. He advocates compatibilism. And his and Thomas Hobbes's wide-reflective subjectivism underpin objective morality- that paradox!
 Notwithstanding the many who claim that he begs the question against miracles, no, he sure doesn't. That is his corollary to the presumption of naturalism that demands evidence for claims of knowledge.