"Continuing failure to support or retract false claims" James R According to this, half of the religion subforum posters should be banned. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Point taken. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But since religious claims can neither be proven nor disproven, they are a horse of a different color. It's a fair approach, in my opinion for things of a solid, physical nature where indeed false claims actually come very close to lying and, even at best, constitute trolling when they are *constantly* repeated like John99's stupid claim about light. Stuff like that can be amusing for a short while - but after that it becomes nauseating. (But I do appreciate your sense of humor here.) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
---the Earth is 6000 years old ---X touched and cured the lepers ---Y stopped the Earth spinning,etc Sure they can be disproven.... There was no claim, but suggestion (should) in my post. Linguistically speaking... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (but I did get the joke) Anyhow, I was just surprised by that reasoning for a ban because I have never seen that before.... (and even in Politics most claims are not supported)
I don't know if this is officially spelled out, but on the Religion, Pseudoscience and Parapsychology subfora we relax some of the rules because we obviously have to in order for them to exist. As for the treatment of false claims on the regular boards, I can't say I'm familiar with the discussion in question. However, as I have often stated, since this is supposed to be a place of science, the scientific method is the law when there are disputes. This means that every assertion can be peer-reviewed, and if it is challenged evidence must be provided to support it or it will be considered falsified and may never be repeated on this website. However, since this is not an academy we don't expect people to cite their own original research. A citation from what in good faith is presented as a reliable secondary, tertiary or quaternary source is good enough. Then we can argue over whose source is more reliable, but in reality that rarely happens. I always hasten to add that the Rule of Laplace, which is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method, should be enforced rigorously here, and I personally do run around enforcing it. "Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before we are obliged to treat them with respect." We can quibble over what "extraordinary" means but again, that rarely happens. So if one person says that wind resistance is proportional to the cube of velocity and another says no, it depends on which constellation the sun is in this month, we have no problem identifying which assertion is the extraordinary one. Or more to the point, it's okay, even if it's a minority opinion, to assert that the effect of human activity on global warming has not been proven to be significant; but it's extraordinary to the point of sheer crackpottery to assert that global warming is not happening at all, as it has been on a more-or-less regular warming-cooling cycle for hundreds of millions of years.
It's called trolling Young Earth creationism can be disproven scientifically; we tend to treat those folks as "evolution deniers". Whether or not the Earth stopped spinning? That should be demonstrable scientifically. Hell, whence comes that particular proposition? But whether or not someone magically cured lepers? Sure, we haven't seen it, but you cannot say with absolute knowledge that it didn't happen. Of course, nobody has done it in recent years, that we might measure and comprehend the mechanisms of such a process. Well, normally, by the time we get to taking action against such behavior, we just call it trolling. Consider this: Member A makes assertion. Member B definitively disproves that assertion. Member A does not respond. A month later, Member A repeats assertion in other discussion. Member C definitively disproves the assertion again. Member A does not respond. Sometime later, in yet another discussion, Member A repeats the assertion. Normally, we just called this trolling, but circumstances demanded that we be more specific in some circumstances.
Well to bring this discussion to a point, here's the particulars of what led to it: John99 (after a bit of arguing) finally accepted that light travels at a finite speed. BUT in practically the same breath, claimed that it takes NO time for light to travel ANY distance. And that, of course is self-contradictory and a totally stupid position to take. BUT get this: He went on to make the same claim a half-dozen times or more in the same thread when asked to provide proof of his stance. So there you have it, boys and girls. Personally, I considered it trolling (or perhaps utter ignorance) - take your pick. :shrug:
you certainly did make a claim - namely that half the posters in the religious forum are theistically inclined 9and therefore deserve to be banned) . I think the only thing you can do to save face is to voluntarily ban yourself in light of the facts
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Maybe they'll ban me for all the goofy images I come up with...prolly sucks down a lot of server... Deities can neither be confirmed nor denied...in other news, I did not have sex with that woman...
As Fraggle said, the rules are a little different for religion and science. Claiming that a basic tenet of accepted science is wrong, without any supporting evidence or argument, amounts to pure trolling on a science forum. While many religious claims are scientifically unlikely, religious people themselves often do not demand the same standards of evidence that scientists demand.
How about Politics? That is full of false statements... I guess religion falls under delusions, so anything can go there without rules....
It is a politicians job to spin bull shit , so lets see what the mods have to say about that anyway ?
How about economics and business . Lots of conflicting business models and the people that use the different models all think there's is the right one
There are all sorts of unsupported claims going around the board. People giving opinions and then running for the hills to throw ad homs if you ask to see it supported.