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Post by Deleted on Feb 25, 2017 20:25:53 GMT
tpfkar That's meaningless, as it's not undesirable for those with no life, as well. It's not meaningless. By bringing consciousness into existence, you create need and hunger, with no guarantee that those needs and hungers will always be satiated (in fact, in practical terms, it is guaranteed that they very often won't be). Given that there's no compelling reason why life needs to be created, then the principle of non-violence should obtain here (an act of imposing a burden on someone else without their consent, even if that burden may bring benefits, is an act of violence). Of course religion was created from a position of ignorance, which is why I made a point of stressing the fact that it continued to persist in an age of science and information. The reason why people choose superstition over a more rational way of perceiving reality is that our unvarnished perception of reality just really isn't all that great. Maybe it is wonderful if you are a middle or upper class American with few problems, but the majority of humans do not enjoy such a decadent lifestyle, and such a lifestyle has only even become attainable very recently in historical terms. People "keep chuggin' along" because that's the default setting, and we are hardwired through evolution to cling on to life even at its most miserable. Humanity wouldn't have exist if our ancestors (who had extremely hard and unpleasant lives) just gave up because the suffering became too much. Suicide is always the hardest choice, and never one without risk (unless you happen to live in a nation that permits physician assisted suicide, and happen to qualify for that service). Those who believe in eternal torture as punishment for committing suicide effectively have that choice barred off from them. And you're still justifying the fact that people with physical incapacity should have to 'wait out the clock' in order to pay for the joy of other people with their suffering. Your outlook is certainly the norm, and I have not gainsaid this fact. But being the popular outlook does not make it the rational one. After all, belief in God is the normal outlook in society, and our atheistic views are the outlier. Your second sentence is just typical 'Rabbitting' gibberish which I cannot even comprehend. And the choice to eliminate the burden is not one which is freely available. The parents that visited the burden upon the person will do anything to prevent their child from rejecting the burden. And then society as a whole will make suicide as inaccessible as practical, and force 'survivors' who are incapacitated to endure their suffering until medical intervention can no longer prolong those lives.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 25, 2017 20:40:43 GMT
Let's put it this way - I may not have a nuanced understanding of your personal reasons for being religious. But what I do know that it is not the product of an honest and dispassionate search for the truth of life. You didn't just hone in on the Bible, with all of its glaring contradictions and the fact that it reflects the state of knowledge of men who did not know about germs or where the sun went at night, and decide that was the text which intellectually comes closest to describing the nature reality and the origin of humans. You would have needed a strong emotional bias to bring you to that conclusion, in light of all of the contradictory and incompatible knowledge about the universe that you have learned. Again, the only reason why you insist this is because you don't realize you are wrong. You can't help but t be guilty pf what you accuse me of which makes you a hypocrite. Of course, I could be wrong once you come up with all the contradictions in the Bible. However, that still doesn't make your mind reading abilities about me any better. It just helps me see whether you're stupid or not or whether it simple ignorance you suffer from. All I'm saying is that a dispassionate and intellectually honest reading of the evidence would not yield a belief in the God of the Bible. So I'm starting from that premise and trying to infer the reasons why otherwise intelligent and educated people might still believe in aforementioned God. One of the things that religion provides is a sense of meaning and purpose to life. So I think that it isn't unreasonable to infer that Christians crave meaning and a sense of purpose. I did use to have some supernatural beliefs of my own, which helps my insight, and I held those beliefs because apparent reality seemed too boring and I wanted to live in a more exciting world than the one that I appeared to live in. So my desire for the supernatural to be true always biased me favourably towards the accounts of those who had reported supernatural sightings, or who had scientific theories which could help to explain supernatural occurrences. As for inconsistencies in the Bible, there are lots of sources for that. Added to that, whenever one of the claims made by the Bible turns out to be scientifically unsupportable (take Noah's Ark, for instance), moderate and liberal Christians will always backpedal and explain that that part wasn't make to be taken literally and was actually apocryphal (even if there were no cues in the text to show that a certain passage was supposed to be apocryphal, whereas another passage is to be taken as the literal truth). So the more information that is gleaned about the nature of reality, the more fast and loose Christians are willing to play with what is supposedly written by, or at least divinely inspired by God.
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Post by cupcakes on Feb 25, 2017 20:46:38 GMT
tpfkar It is meaningless as nothing applies to a nonexistent being. And what's your principle of non-violence? Violence can be good for good reasons, not that creation is a violent act just because the creation may face violence. People choose religion mostly via indoctrination. People keep going because they find life to be net-positive. A hard choice is still a choice. And if someone truly believes their life is net negative, they'll choose it. And you're saying that the multitudes should be barred from joy due to extremely rare circumstances over which they have no control. In the case of embracing life vs. denying it, the norm is also the rational. Just as are the actions that would be taken by a rational physically capable person if that person in fact found existence to be a net negative. For any rational, physically capable person, suicide is trivially accessible.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 25, 2017 21:02:12 GMT
tpfkar It is meaningless as nothing applies to a nonexistent being. And what's your principle of non-violence? Violence can be good for good reasons, not that creation is a violent act just because the creation may face violence. The principle of non-violence means not to inflict violence on someone without compelling reason to do so. Violence in this case would be the imposition of needs, wants and the potential for suffering by way of the creation of new life. So parents giving birth to a new life is an act of violence, even though (in most cases) the intentions are good. There is no rational basis to establish the notion that the perpetuation of the human species serves some sort of higher, virtuous purpose, and therefore we should be obliged not to impose new life on those who cannot consent. But otherwise educated and intelligent people need a reason why their faith should be sustained. And when you ask people of faith how they would view a godless universe (I have done this several times), they perceive it as being a bleak and desolate wasteland. Ergo, their faith emotionally bolsters them. There's no rational basis for this. Our instincts militate against us just rationally deciding that life's benefits are not worth it and then deciding to die. If this were the case, there would be a suicide epidemic sweeping the planet that most would find alarming. Many severely mentally ill people also do not choose suicide, but spend their lives debilitated by chronic suffering and would not say that they find their life experiences to be mainly positive. It is a choice that is accessible only to those who are fearless enough to follow through with it. And if life were made extinct, then the only people who would be barred from joy would be those who had invested all of their hopes into being parents and those who would rely on the younger generation for support. I'm not discounting the fact that implementing an antinatalist policy would cause untold suffering, but that suffering would die out with the last human, it would not be perpetuated until the human species was made extinct by some form of man-made or natural catastrophe. But what is your rational basis for asserting that life is intrinsically good? Certainly, there appears to be no God who created it for a particular purpose. Since we have no authority to assure us that life was created for a purpose, and that the purpose was worthy, there is no scientific reason to assert that life is inherently good. And if suicide was trivially accessible, then suicide would be an epidemic. I certainly would not be here to post this, and mental illness would be very uncommon. You are disingenuously ignoring the fact that humans are hardwired with a survival instinct, which does not have to correlate with our rational assessment of our quality of life.
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Post by OpiateOfTheMasses on Feb 26, 2017 0:53:44 GMT
If heaven (or hell for that matter) and an all-knowing God exists then our mortal lives are absolutely pointless. God will know what choices we will make and God will know if we a worthy of Heaven before we're even conceived. And as for "making us play it out in the real world" - how can it possibly be a fair test to have some people be born into absolute poverty with live-limiting painful diseases and others born into almost unlimited wealth with perfect health? Should we be jealous of the infants that die in the first few weeks of their lives because they're getting an express pass to Heaven? Or pity the fabulously wealthy because there are more expectations on them to be "better Christians"? I don't think poor people get a pass on sinning because they're poor, so I don't think rich people really feel the need to do any more that they do either...
If God really has set this system up and really does have all the powers as described in Christianity then God is either a sadist or an idiot (hey - being all powerful doesn't mean you're smart!). Either way - it doesn't make me feel like it's something that we should we should be brainwashing our kids into praising. Unless... of course... God really is a petty, mean bastard and we're doing it just to try to keep them safe from his petulance and his childish tantrums?
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Feb 26, 2017 3:01:30 GMT
If heaven (or hell for that matter) and an all-knowing God exists then our mortal lives are absolutely pointless. God will know what choices we will make and God will know if we a worthy of Heaven before we're even conceived. And as for "making us play it out in the real world" - how can it possibly be a fair test to have some people be born into absolute poverty with live-limiting painful diseases and others born into almost unlimited wealth with perfect health? Should we be jealous of the infants that die in the first few weeks of their lives because they're getting an express pass to Heaven? Or pity the fabulously wealthy because there are more expectations on them to be "better Christians"? I don't think poor people get a pass on sinning because they're poor, so I don't think rich people really feel the need to do any more that they do either... If God really has set this system up and really does have all the powers as described in Christianity then God is either a sadist or an idiot (hey - being all powerful doesn't mean you're smart!). Either way - it doesn't make me feel like it's something that we should we should be brainwashing our kids into praising. Unless... of course... God really is a petty, mean bastard and we're doing it just to try to keep them safe from his petulance and his childish tantrums? None of this is really true. I have no idea why it is so important for people to create conditions on things that not only are never mentioned as conditions but also make no sense if put into practice. Just because there is a repercussion of something in no way means that there is a need to foreknow who gets that repercussion. Life always has meaning anyway specifically because the thing alive places value in it. No one who isn't a complete moron is spending their life thinking about how meaningless it is. They're living it to the best of their ability which automatically means it has meaning. Whining about God's place in it is retarded unless you care about worshiping God. If one finds their life meaningless, it only means that their life sucks and they should work hard to avoid diagnosing others based their meager interpretations.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:34:22 GMT
If heaven (or hell for that matter) and an all-knowing God exists then our mortal lives are absolutely pointless. God will know what choices we will make and God will know if we a worthy of Heaven before we're even conceived. And as for "making us play it out in the real world" - how can it possibly be a fair test to have some people be born into absolute poverty with live-limiting painful diseases and others born into almost unlimited wealth with perfect health? Should we be jealous of the infants that die in the first few weeks of their lives because they're getting an express pass to Heaven? Or pity the fabulously wealthy because there are more expectations on them to be "better Christians"? I don't think poor people get a pass on sinning because they're poor, so I don't think rich people really feel the need to do any more that they do either... If God really has set this system up and really does have all the powers as described in Christianity then God is either a sadist or an idiot (hey - being all powerful doesn't mean you're smart!). Either way - it doesn't make me feel like it's something that we should we should be brainwashing our kids into praising. Unless... of course... God really is a petty, mean bastard and we're doing it just to try to keep them safe from his petulance and his childish tantrums? Free will is an illusion regardless of whether God exists. But if God does exist, then it could not be the omnibenevolent, omnipotent God that the Christians worship. It would either have to have not entirely benevolent intentions, or be not all-knowledgeable or entirely competent.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:36:19 GMT
If heaven (or hell for that matter) and an all-knowing God exists then our mortal lives are absolutely pointless. God will know what choices we will make and God will know if we a worthy of Heaven before we're even conceived. And as for "making us play it out in the real world" - how can it possibly be a fair test to have some people be born into absolute poverty with live-limiting painful diseases and others born into almost unlimited wealth with perfect health? Should we be jealous of the infants that die in the first few weeks of their lives because they're getting an express pass to Heaven? Or pity the fabulously wealthy because there are more expectations on them to be "better Christians"? I don't think poor people get a pass on sinning because they're poor, so I don't think rich people really feel the need to do any more that they do either... If God really has set this system up and really does have all the powers as described in Christianity then God is either a sadist or an idiot (hey - being all powerful doesn't mean you're smart!). Either way - it doesn't make me feel like it's something that we should we should be brainwashing our kids into praising. Unless... of course... God really is a petty, mean bastard and we're doing it just to try to keep them safe from his petulance and his childish tantrums? Free will is an illusion regardless of whether God exists. But if God does exist, then it could not be the omnibenevolent, omnipotent God that the Christians worship. It would either have to have not entirely benevolent intentions, or be not all-knowledgeable or entirely competent. Free will is an illusion because you said so. Ok.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:40:39 GMT
Free will is an illusion regardless of whether God exists. But if God does exist, then it could not be the omnibenevolent, omnipotent God that the Christians worship. It would either have to have not entirely benevolent intentions, or be not all-knowledgeable or entirely competent. Free will is an illusion because you said so. Ok. It's an illusion because we can't choose the inputs which make our brains what they are, we can't choose our own biases, preferences and predilections and we cannot choose which thoughts to think before we think them. Remember that thread you started, but which you are now ignoring because you are 'butthurt' over the fact that most atheists do not believe that the only matter in the universe which does not abide by any laws of physics (or logic) is that contained inside the cranium of a human?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:45:24 GMT
Atheists can give their lives meaning. However what is apparent is that the meaning that one gives one's own life is not sufficient for theists, who are emotionally compelled to believe that their lives are part of some greater meaning. Which is why many theists take great umbrage at even the most respectful and restrained statement of scepticism about the claims of theists. The mere idea of atheism induces existential terror in many theists.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:47:10 GMT
Free will is an illusion because you said so. Ok. It's an illusion because we can't choose the inputs which make our brains what they are, we can't choose our own biases, preferences and predilections and we cannot choose which thoughts to think before we think them. Remember that thread you started, but which you are now ignoring because you are 'butthurt' over the fact that most atheists do not believe that the only matter in the universe which does not abide by any laws of physics (or logic) is that contained inside the cranium of a human? You are entitled to believe whatever you want to. Doesn't make it right. You are entitled to be a Hard determinist such as Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach: Determinism is universal, in Holbach's view, but different sorts of bodies may have peculiar properties that require peculiar explanations.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 8:50:50 GMT
It's an illusion because we can't choose the inputs which make our brains what they are, we can't choose our own biases, preferences and predilections and we cannot choose which thoughts to think before we think them. Remember that thread you started, but which you are now ignoring because you are 'butthurt' over the fact that most atheists do not believe that the only matter in the universe which does not abide by any laws of physics (or logic) is that contained inside the cranium of a human? You are entitled to believe whatever you want to. Doesn't make it right. You are entitled to be a Hard determinist such as Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach: Yes, and you haven't once ventured a coherent explanation of how you think that free will works. Not once. But you're not alone in that, because out of the innumerable times that I've had this debate on the internet, nobody else has been able to either. I would recommend reading this article, unless you're too scared: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:01:09 GMT
You are entitled to believe whatever you want to. Doesn't make it right. You are entitled to be a Hard determinist such as Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach: Yes, and you haven't once ventured a coherent explanation of how you think that free will works. Not once. But you're not alone in that, because out of the innumerable times that I've had this debate on the internet, nobody else has been able to either. I would recommend reading this article, unless you're too scared: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/I don't have to prove that free will works to a hard determinist such as yourself who is clearly dogmatic about it.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:06:09 GMT
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Post by The Lost One on Feb 26, 2017 9:06:15 GMT
'Good' is only a construct which described relief from 'bad'. The negative needs to be there, at least in potentia, for the good to have any meaning. Ok, this is what your argument relies on but I don't think it's how most people view the world. Suppose you were at a party and having a good time. You leave for another party and have an even better time. Would you say the difference is you're suffering less at the second party even though you were enjoying both parties? If not, goodness must be more than the alleviation of suffering.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:11:14 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:20:50 GMT
Consider this: positive experiences only have any value to sentient organisms which are capable of appreciating both positive and negative. A non-existent organism has no use for any positive experiences, without the capacity for pleasure, or to feel the absence of negativity. Also consider that positive experiences are mainly defined by the absence of negativity.
So why would a creator of infinite wisdom bring sentient life into the universe when there was a near-certainty of each organism experiencing great harm, and when the reward for a lifetime of harm and hardship was meaningless? If there were no afterlife, but just oblivion after death, this would be JUST AS GOOD as any heavenly reward that could be envisaged, because we would no longer have any need or desire for the reward. Non-existence is objectively just as good as a good life. God's entire rationale for creating humanity, including the reward that he has given us the chance to earn, is based on very unstable foundations.
What is the point of this life? Answer this first.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:35:19 GMT
I don't have to prove that free will works to a hard determinist such as yourself who is clearly dogmatic about it. No, I'm open minded about it if anyone can actually provide a coherent account of how it might work. And I'm not asking you how it works in terms of physics, I want you to describe it in logical terms. So first off the bat, I think that we would have to assume that there is some dualism between mind and soul. But even if that's the case, what influences the soul to make a decision? You're basically saying that we choose our own bias without any pre-existing bias with which to choose. And since we're posting cartoon strips:
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:40:40 GMT
'Good' is only a construct which described relief from 'bad'. The negative needs to be there, at least in potentia, for the good to have any meaning. Ok, this is what your argument relies on but I don't think it's how most people view the world. Suppose you were at a party and having a good time. You leave for another party and have an even better time. Would you say the difference is you're suffering less at the second party even though you were enjoying both parties? If not, goodness must be more than the alleviation of suffering. It really relies more on the fact that good is only necessary and only has any value as long as there is a beholder to perceive the good. So I don't think that there is any moral need to bring 'good' into the world, especially when it is absolutely certain to come at the expense of grievous suffering endured by somebody else. And if the first party is a 7/10, compared to a 9/10 for the second party, then there must be some kind of negative element to it (like perhaps at the first party you're just talking to people and at the second party you are engaging in an activity) which tempers one's enjoyment of it. If God sent all of his souls straight to heaven without having to endure suffering first here on Earth, then I wouldn't have any moral problem with that, although I would still consider it rather pointless.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 26, 2017 9:41:40 GMT
Consider this: positive experiences only have any value to sentient organisms which are capable of appreciating both positive and negative. A non-existent organism has no use for any positive experiences, without the capacity for pleasure, or to feel the absence of negativity. Also consider that positive experiences are mainly defined by the absence of negativity.
So why would a creator of infinite wisdom bring sentient life into the universe when there was a near-certainty of each organism experiencing great harm, and when the reward for a lifetime of harm and hardship was meaningless? If there were no afterlife, but just oblivion after death, this would be JUST AS GOOD as any heavenly reward that could be envisaged, because we would no longer have any need or desire for the reward. Non-existence is objectively just as good as a good life. God's entire rationale for creating humanity, including the reward that he has given us the chance to earn, is based on very unstable foundations.
What is the point of this life? Answer this first. If by 'point' you mean some kind of purpose for which it was created, then I would say there is no point. It's just something that happened. It doesn't have a designed function or purpose.
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