> For a positivist, you’re not very strong on logic.
When the ad hominems start I know I'm on the right track
> The rock has no will / The god, real or not, is a being with a will.
How do you know god is a being with a will? This is the fallacy of special pleading. You are defining god and giving it characteristics that precisely allows you to say it is different than something with no will.
> It doesn’t matter if you or I believe praying works, the point is that prayer is talking to a sentient god. Magic spells is not.
>> Sure, you can use superstition as a slur for things you don’t believe in.
> I’m not dictating what the word means
That is precisely what you are doing by trying to insinuate that I am using a "slur". You do not have the authority to conjure a belief system out of thin air, assert that it is true without evidence, and start dictating to people the manner in which they are allowed to speak about it.
> In your example the difference is that the rock effect is automatic, like gravity, but the god is a sentient being that has a will.
There is no difference. This is the fallacy of special pleading. You're saying that the example with god is different because you defined god to be different from the thing you don't want it to be the same as. You are presupposing gods existence. There is no evidence such an entity exists and is therefore superstition.
> A person believes something that results in superstition. This definition states that superstition creates itself.
This is nonsense. Nothing is "created" when someone says something superstitious. There is no cause and effect. Supernatural entities/realms either exits or they do not. And there is zero evidence they do. Whether or not they actually do doesn't matter, it is rational to not believe in them until someone presents evidence for their existence.
> Godel's incompleteness theorem proves that we cannot prove all the laws in the universe
His theorem says no such thing. It simply makes a statement about the trade-off between the consistency of axiomatic systems and the provability of truth statements. I could easily just argue the universe is a system with inconsistent axioms where every law can be proved.
> we know conclusively that recent discoveries (eg, James Webb showing unexpected galaxy sizes) show that much of our current "laws of nature" are definitely in conflict with reality
This is called science. We collect evidence. We develop approximations of reality that best conform to this evidence. We collect new evidence. We refine our approximations.
> so many theoretical physicists are "simulationists" where they believe the universe is a simulation where the creators can exert complete control
I don't care what "so many theoretical physicists" believe. I care what they publish in peer-reviewed literature.
> Perhaps humans are simply hardwired for religion.
Perhaps humans are hardwired to make spears and kill each other or hunt and gather. That doesn't mean we should be doing that in 2023.
>The founders saw it necessary that people have a religious based moral system. The same system and values that they based the government on.
In the system of government they created women were not able to participate in the body politic and slavery was legal. The suppression of women in society and slavery are both endorsed in the bible. Being superstitious has nothing to do with morality or ethics.
> The premise all men are created equal relies on religion to be true. Inalienable rights is a judao Christian idea.
This is demonstrably false. Christianity had 17 centuries before the French Revolution to setup a system of government based on these ideas but instead was aligned with Monarchy and Feudalism. Equality and inalienable rights are Enlightenment ideas.
The Catholic Church declaring that a collection of fictional stories are the word of god and 1.345 billion people believing that does not make the collection of stories not fictional. You're appealing to authority and the populace.
When the ad hominems start I know I'm on the right track
> The rock has no will / The god, real or not, is a being with a will.
How do you know god is a being with a will? This is the fallacy of special pleading. You are defining god and giving it characteristics that precisely allows you to say it is different than something with no will.
> It doesn’t matter if you or I believe praying works, the point is that prayer is talking to a sentient god. Magic spells is not.
And both are superstition.
> You learn this stuff in middle school.
I went to a school that taught math & science.