Talk:Atheism/Archive 19

message: Per Wikipedia guidelines we should repair the "what people believe"-flaws in the Types of atheism section. That is, what people believe should not be discussed in the sense of "a this person believes that"; instead, we should write "atheism as this and that does this and that." In addition, we need to cite sources using inline citation or superscript. Adraeus 17:17, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure we can actually do that, though, since the issue is that people dispute what the statement "atheism as this and that does this and that" should be. Since there isn't really an objective final authority one can go to to find out what the proper statement of "atheism as this and that" is, all we can do is describe what various people believe about it. Bryan 05:50, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article requires alignment with editing guidelines 

message: Concision is more effective than verbosity because humans understand and abstract terse language more quickly and efficiently.
I just want to point out that quickness and efficiency of understanding is not the goal here. Disseminating knowledge to as many people as possible is, and maintaining absolute concision as a strategy for writing is contrary to that goal. Verbosity or redundancy is more effective than concision because it helps ensure the message gets across even if some of the message is not perfectly understood. If you reduce a message to just the minimum words required to convey a message you risk people misunderstanding or not understanding if they don't know or completely understand the words you choose. By restating things in different ways, you can ensure that everyone understands you. Note that I am not advocating writing bloated, pleonastic prose, but just pointing out that arguments about smaller word counts being prima facia better are not necessarily valid. Nohat 02:17, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As someone whose successful career and business centers on effective communication, I disagree. Concision, defined as "terseness and economy in writing and speaking achieved by expressing a great deal in just a few word"WordNet, does not imply or require using lesser known terms. In fact, a great deal of concision, especially in advertising, is demonstrably layman-oriented. Nike's "just do it" slogan wouldn't be effective if it were written "maintain situational neglect during ambitious progress." My writing philosophy is: "don't write two words where one word will suffice." That attitude has garnered me much praise and recognition as both a writer and as the professional in the field within which I roam. The fact is: if you design your communications to achieve a specific objectiveWordNet, you communicate more effectively and your message's recipient(s) understand your message more efficiently. If you disagree now, I understand: sometimes these concepts necessitate experiential education. Adraeus 07:28, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you look in the scientific literature on language and understanding, you find that there is redundancy at all levels of language, from the acoustic level to the level of pragmatics of discourse. For example, in English, the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is made not just by a simple dichotomy of voicing of the consants, but also there is aspiration of voiceless consonants and there is compensatory lengthening of vowels before voiced consonants. This is redundancy in the acoustic signal. At the morphological level, in many languages certain affixes are not strictly necessary to convey meaning, but are required by the grammar for "agreement". This is particularly noticeable in for example Romance languages like Spanish, where adjectives are inflected for gender and number in addition to nouns, but it also occurs in English, with the -s inflection required for third person singular present indicative forms (he walks). Redundancy also plays an important role at the syntactic and pragmatic level, too, which is kind of redundancy you are pooh-poohing (reduplication here is another example of a kind of redundancy). There have been studies that show that people are more likely to have understood something if it was explained in two different ways than if it was only explained in one way. There are other examples of evidence for the importance of redundancy in the body of linguistic research on the topic. You haven't really provided any reason why terseness is more effective other than stating that it is, and that you use it and have been praised. I must confess I don't find those kinds of arguments to be particularly persuasive. As I explained before, I'm not advocating unnecessary bloat—just that concision as a goal unto itself has not been proven effective as a practical method to increase the effectiveness of conveying information, and in fact there is a large body of evidence that redundancy plays an important role in communication. Nohat 08:52, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Successful communication (or persuasion) requires manifest consistency throughout the communication (or persuasion) cycle. I think you simply misunderstand what I mean by "concision" and "redundancy" and how manifest consistency (abstract: redundancy) applies to literary works. Verbal concision is the act of designing communication for the purpose of effectively transmitting an objectively crafted message to a prospective recipient, and for the purpose of increasing the accuracy of a prospective recipient's cognitive abstraction capabilities. Language is a horrible format for communication; unfortunately, language is a necessary evil so we have to make do. Language is often misinterpreted, reinterpreted, translated, misused, and abused. Verbal concision enables humans, especially those of a scientific orientation, to use language optimally while minimizing the risks of cognitive manipulation (to the extent that the message's initial meaning isn't understood.) "Just the facts, ma'am", in a manner of speaking. All traditional sciences operate using verbal concision. If that's not sufficient evidence of verbal concision's effectiveness as a practical method for increasing the effectiveness of information conveyance and the efficiency of information abstraction, I don't know what is. (By the way, it's nice to find someone knowledgeable and presumably interested in the communication sciences. If you haven't already, discover memetics .) Adraeus 09:22, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Assuming that what's being referred to here is 'conciseness' (don't tell me; Yale University scholars have pronounced that 'conciseness' is archaic...), did it really take so many words to argue for it — and so many polysyllables to boot?  (By the way, it's not 'centres around' but 'centres on'.) Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 18:22, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for the correction. Adraeus 22:19, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Off-topic: concision not necessarily good 

message: I understand that previously there was a general agreement that the introductory paragraph should summarize important points from each section of the article. Currently, the paragraph only summarizes the definitions, the history, and the state of atheism today. The paragraph lacks coverage of etymology, statistics, the various views, and morality. I think we should summarize the article using no more than two sentences per section or using two paragraphs for the introduction. Adraeus 23:33, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: How can we improve the introduction?

message: This sentence of Intro is misleading. 
I recommend to replace it with Communist countries used term atheism to describe their position to traditional religions or something like that.
The communism was intolerant religion of its own (with prophets, icons, martyrs and heretics, dogmas, with complete explanation of the past and future, with solution to problem of evil, etc). God was replaced by forces of history. Only individual afterlife was missing. Questioning of dogma was risky or unwelcomed, depending on date and place. 
The word atheism was used by prophets so it conveniently stuck in. Its association with science and reason was also plus for propaganda. 
Communism (commonly called socialism) in Czechoslovakia fell down when I was 20 so I can give some insight about this country. 
Initially, after takeover, the new religion was very active, trying to push itself everywhere all the time (e.g. with journals for small children being completely filled with propaganda of new order etc). In last decades before fall its influence disappeared - practically no one had believed in dogma, ideals of communism were (unofficially) ridiculed, its leaders seen as idiots, with no hope of anything getting better or different.
This was possibly time when the country become dominantly atheistic - old gods were forgotten or destroyed, new gods failed miserably. But I think this is not what current sentence wants to say.
I guess this was similar for most of European countries under rule of socialism (don't know much about Poland, no idea about China and like). 
Pavel Vozenilek 13:53, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Even if we were talking about religion, this would be at best highly controversial.  The use of 'religion' as applied to state-communism is usually regarded as metaphorical.  In fact, though, we're talking about god, and as you claim yourself, god was replaced in state-communism.  Therefore state-communism was atheist. Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 21:34, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: During 20 years of Czechoslovakia officially preached atheims, socialism, communism, whatever became empty words that people ignored as noise. Population was secular (for various historical reasons) and state simply stopped to care - it gave up (most of) its own semi-religious propaganda, it stopped (most of) active anti-church propaganda and it concentrated only on survival. I think attributing such state as atheist is misleading. (Communism as pure ideology is different but there were no communists anymore.) Pavel Vozenilek 00:30, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sentence 'Atheism had become dominant in Communist states'