The importance of testing and problem of eyewitness testimony.

[quatona]

Keep bringing sense to these forums and maybe people will start thinking in new ways, that's my hope at least

That´s my hope, as well.

 

[Ana the Ist]

You are making the same mistake with the term "Communism" as you are making with the term "Religion". There are a wide variety of permutations in communism, but it doesn't imply and necessitate the direct control and ownership and means of production. That ownership in either case is a government-moderated ownership, be it central state government, or some sort of Factory Committee.

To say that USSR was not a form of Communism, while most historians and sociologists say that it was... is somewhat misguided IMO.



So, because that form of Communism didn't achieve that, it means it wasn't "true Communism"? You have a continuum fallacy brewing here, and I'm not exactly following what your point is... I'm not sure I'd like to know at this point, because it's trivial really to the original point I was making.



My original point in this, with you going in some very bizarre tangent here, is:

1) The definition of the religion you've provided was very broad
2) Then you smash that enormous ball of things you define as religion, and say all of it is false, and you name things like "prayer" and etc, etc, as some odd evidence for why you think all of the religion is false

It's sort of like saying "Science is wrong!", because scientists in the past made false assumptions. Well, that's sort of the point of science. Religion is a "science" of sort. People try to explain. Religion provides some provisional answers. When it's falsified, it reforms and moves on.

Overwhelming majority of philosophy we have today comes from the background of religion as a starting point. Philosophy gave grounding to science that we have today.

Saying that religion is false is somewhat misguided in a sense that religion is not there to provide you with proof for "magical beings". It's there to set a workable context of reality that's inaccessible to scientific method.

In that, there will be plenty of false premises in religion, just like there were plenty of false premises in science. The difference is that religion tends to be a form of traditional mindset which is slow to change and reform, thus there will always be some generational cognitive dissonance when it comes to getting rid of things that can be shown false.

You've made an appeal to authority and popularity...two logically fallacies before you've even finished with your first paragraph.

The framework for communism, which I only named three parts of, were the foundation for both Marxism and Leninism. Would you like to discuss Trotskyist communism and how that wasn't achieved either?

I would say that most historians consider what you lived through to be a dictatorship, socialist in nature, with varying degrees of legitimacy depending upon which leader we're speaking of. I can argue these points all day long Dre...this is my field of study. You never lived under communism, sorry to be the one to break it to you.

Prayer is but one example of the falsehoods in religion. I told you there are many many others. I've even showed you where your logic is flawed with your original two premises...as have others now.