[MD] Faith/Skepticism

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Michael]
What Arlo said, and especially as evidenced by your reply to it, is 
scant "evidence" in Arlo's terms of anything other than the fact that 
Quality/MoQ is a faith, based on pre-intellectual belief, making it 
(in Arlo's terms) no more worthy of his attention than God or Leprechauns.

[Arlo]
Then you are missing the context entirely.

Some pointers. Your "theistic Christian" rejoinder... you move the 
"evidence" away from the experience of the dog and onto the presence 
of sunlight. "Today Arlo's dog laid down and bathed in God's light". 
The first part is evidence of Quality. The latter part is your 
projection as to what created the "light".

I chose my "god" not because of its reverse "god" spelling, but to 
demonstrate (as DMB correctly saw) that, unlike the experience of 
"god", the experience of Quality is something "even a dog knows" 
(according the MOQ, all patterns from inorganic to intellectual are 
the result of responses to Quality).

Lastly, it places Quality in the experiential domain, and not in the 
"faith" domain. My dog doesn't need to believe or have faith in 
anything. But he certainly knows "its better" to lay in sunlight in 
that moment that to not.

You know, I find it funny really. For how many years the "theists" 
response to science was to attempt to elevate "theism" to be a 
comparable alternative to "science". You had creationist institutes 
and all sorts of attempts made to demonstrate that "theism" is not 
based on "faith" but on "evidence". That seemed to fail (in the 
larger dialogue, anyway), and now its seems that the attempt is being 
made to lower "science" to the domain of "theism". Where in the past 
"theists" said, "our beliefs are not based on faith but on evidence", 
now they say, "well, you're beliefs are just based in faith too". And 
in the end try to make the argument that believing in leprechauns or 
quantum physics is really just the same thing, all just a matter of 
faith, and none are better, just different stories. Whether or not 
the earth was made 4,000 years ago or 4 billion years ago is really 
just a matter of faith of both sides, no one knows who is right, and 
so we should teach both as equal but competing "faiths" about the world.

You said it yourself, "Quality... God.. same thing".  The MOQ is 
really just another theism. Quality is just another God. And all this 
is just another flavor of Kool-aid.

And yet, still, (to paraphrase Platt), "even my dog knows 'it's 
better here'". And he doesn't need any Kool-aid to figure that out.