Poland's atheist loonies have had their 5 minutes

I'm not, I never said that God produced better results than science, I said that religion produced results.

I think you have missed the point somewhat, religion has produced results in parallel to science that are measured in a different way, that cannot be quantified, I'm not talking about do gooders helping the infirm to hospital etc but intangible benefits similar to what science calls the placebo effect.


Arguing that Science is what scientists do is the same argument that religious people use. It must be within the scientific method otherwise the logic used as justification for the superiority of science over religion disappears. Its not good enough to have an anything goes approach.

Tomorrow, everywhere in Poland for the 19th time WOSP will collect money for the children of Poland. Helping without converting. Thousands of volunteers will work for that as they do every year.

Attacked by the crossist smolenkist fraction of this country.

Is it tomorrow? Good luck to them.

And it's true, there have been reports of them being condemned from the pulpit - the reason why is anyone's guess.

What network is it being broadcast on?

TVP2, TVN and Canal+ as well as local stations.

Don't forget you can donate by SMS.


media2.pl/media/60268-final-wosp:-plan-transmisji-w-tv,-numery-sms.html

Thx! The better half said there might be some footage / coverage of her former workplace!

WOSP has to be applauded for the work it does, J O is considered autocratic so I am sure he upsets a few along the way.

Mr Oatmeal (Owsiak) has worked hard to prove that you cannot simply raise funds for a noble cause for tis own sake. You have to seduce young people with idiotic slogans like 'róbta co chceta' and 'siema', pretend to be a rocking, ear-pierced 50-year-old fart and organise drunken, drug-laced rock concerts as incentives. Why not show the young that helping sick and handicapped children is its own reward?

Because they are too smart to be fooled? ;-)

Finger licking good.

A commendable idea, but would it engage them as much as WOSP? There was famine relief long before Live Aid, but if that's what it took to get the donations coming, so be it.

Plenty of priests, nuns etc were helping the most wretched people before Mother Theresa came along, but her media-savvyness got people's attention and that was no bad thing.

Who cares if the concerts are drunken and drug-laced? There's still vast amounts of money going to children that need the money most - how it's raised really doesn't matter.


Not a chance. The sheer success of WOSP is down to the fact that it's successfully engaged young people - who are normally apathy-laden!

Mate - there is no other kind. Never been to one?

Barney wrote:


Yet again, the placebo effect is not a religious phenomenon. It's a case of someone thinking in their minds that they're being helped in one way or another and that positive attitude can potentially improve their health. You do not need religion to do that, there are 1,000 other ways.

Let's take a scientific example: Someone's in the hospital with a terrible disease and the doctor tells them, "there's a new procedure, it has had remarkable results, almost 100% success rate, we're going to start you on it tomorrow morning," and voila, the placebo effect.

If you're going to talk about two things, religion and science, you must successfully seperate one from the other. The placebo effect is not unique to religion.

I think I wrote something like "similar to what Science calls the Placebo effect" meaning there is no rational explanation for this effect. Its not a leap of faith to see how an unexplained phenomenon can be measured in different ways, it hasnt been codified.

barney wrote:


if someone gets better due to their "belief" that some supernatural being helped them along the way, meaning it was in fact their positive attitude that produced such positive results, this is the placebo effect. nothing more, nothing less. religion cannot lay claim to that. what religion routinely does though, however, is claim that God intervened, "saved" the person from death or further suffering. claims such as these cannot be proved and are no more rational than a boat captain blaming the stormy seas on Poseidon. same level of crazy, same level of irrationality.

also, saying "there is no rational explination" also is not a religious claim. yet again you are making no seperation at all which brings me back to my original question.

praying to an invisible being can only change someone's life in 2 ways:

1) if the prayers are answered and their personal God intervenes....which is the equivalent to believing that Obama is a reincarnate of Elvis.

2) the placebo effect. not something "similar", but exactly that, which leads non believers to ask religious believers this:

What do you get from religion that I cannot get from another source? What results can you produce that I cannot?

The luuuuurve, man. And/or the guilt complex.

... and this terrifying feeling that for our sins on this Earth we can spend whole eternity in hell, suffering unimaginable anguish and pain


... yeah, and this terrifying feeling that for our sins on this Earth we can spend whole eternity in hell, suffering unimaginable anguish and tearing pain from being hung by the testicles over a cauldron of sulphur and fire.

You dont know because it hasnt been explained by science so any claim that science makes is as valid as any claim made by non scientists in this instance.


And that is the very point I have been making all along, if you cannot falsify a belief it has no more validity than any other belief, evolution cannot be falsified.

The only way to evaluate competing beliefs is to resort to either probability or a measurement of results which use different yardsticks making the task that little bit harder if not impossible.

Once one has dropped logic, claiming that your system is better or superior to another is bogus.


All sorts of results that cannot be measured by science. Today I am 7.8346 happy just doesnt work.

Of course so called empirical, logical thinkers will gladly use rubbish like IQ tests to make decisions, I dont see anyone belittling their belief system.

I have been saying this for a few days now, you need to separate logic from belief if you claim there is a logical basis for saying there is no God.

It can in logic and in principle, therefore the Popper distinction holds. One can easily conceive of the kind of evidence that would disprove it were it to exist.

In principle yes but in logic? I would really appreciate if you can demonstrate that.
Popper himself said it cannot be falsified and referred to evolution as a metaphysical platform.

So in a round about way we're stuck with evolution???

On his understanding of evolution (still, effectively, a black-box mechanism) perhaps - complexity theory (and artificial-life experiments conducted much more recently) fill in a lot of the gaps. Not to mention the ever-growing fossil record itself.

Natural selection is what we are discussing, (the bare bones of evolution…inside the box) the thing that evolution hangs on. That is why I referred to it as being the platform for other easily falsifiable ideas.

The fact remains that natural selection works and can be demonstrated to do so but it is as logical/illogical as any other belief.

If I may sum up your position, it is this:
Belief in a God and Evolution are equal becuase they are not falsafiable and therefore it does not fall in to the riggers of the scientific method of evaluation.

barney wrote:


this is essentially a non statement.

what you are saying is limitless. you could use statements like this to essentially discredit ANYTHING that is thought to be true or fact in this world because "belief" has no boundaries.

years ago they thought that if a human wasn't sacrificed every day the sun wouldn't rise but as crazy as that sounded, no scientist at that time could prove them wrong. the information simply wasn't available. In today's day, take any belief in any religion that a scientist cannot disprove outright and you're looking at the same scenerio. same game.

This is known as Russell's Teapot, but also as the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Welcome to doctrinaire postmodernism - the tumour in the spine of academe.

Im an athiest, myself at heart, but i disagree with your bluntness, there is a power in ritual that creates calm and compassion:sort of like what the soap opera does for the consumer mind-set.

Belief in God and evolution is not the same. Belief in evolution is based upon evidence that can be measured in a scientific way. I agree with the rest.

Evolution doesn't lend its self to analysis by the formal method of "hypothesis testing" and often seeks to explain in an apparent ad hoc way. For example the gaps in the fossil record that gradual change cannot explain (save that they are lost or Dawkins view that the creatures migrated) have been explained by punctuated equilibrium (a jerky change) there are problems with that approach so punctuated gradualism (Jerky in a different way) was used. Together these fit the observable data but one by itself cannot explain all the data. Its possible that all three or more mechanisms operated together but again this is not a tweak, doesn't make predictions and is untestable.

I joined this thread because Posters were using the logic of science to say there is no God, and I pointed out that there are flaws in the logic of some sciences so their argument was illogical.

I'm not discrediting anything merely pointing out that Science is not as logically sound as some believe. My non statement that you quoted in fact describes what science tries to do, remove superstition. Any blind acceptance of "science" is just a form of belief. I dont know is a powerful statement showing an open scientific mind.


Alchemists and astrologers were not scientists, empiricism wasn't invented.