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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Mar 2, 2017 15:29:33 GMT
There's been plenty of moral people that have been spanked as kids.
That said, I'm not sure why the Option B isn't considered analogous to Christian ideals.
Again, if questions are asked rather than answers assumed, I think the non-religious would learn more about who they accuse of stuff.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2017 16:13:10 GMT
There's been plenty of moral people that have been spanked as kids. Sure there are. So what? The point I made was that offering "you will be spanked" as a reason not to behave a certain way does not instil morality. Do you disagree with this? If so, why? Because christianity is ultimately authoritarian. God says "thou shalt not", but does not say why thou shalt not other than to say "because I'll send you to heaven if you don't and hell if you do". You only have to look at the garden of eden story, the moral of which is "stay ignorant and do as you're told". The god of the bible acts in an authoritarian manner - and yet the book contains no moral basis for god's alleged authority whatsoever. Questions WERE asked, right in this thread. The person they were asked of ran away, demonstrating the truth of the thread title. For that matter, up to now your only offering towards me is "no christian ever says that", which is patently untrue. |
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Post by The Lost One on Mar 2, 2017 16:30:39 GMT
Because christianity is ultimately authoritarian. God says "thou shalt not", but does not say why thou shalt not other than to say "because I'll send you to heaven if you don't and hell if you do". I don't think that's altogether fair on Christianity. The Golden Rule for instance is based on empathy and many Christians would fall back on that rather than the more authoritarian Ten Commandments. I mean I suppose you could argue that Jesus doesn't really explain why we should adhere to the Golden Rule, but then secular ethics are not really any better in that regard. That we should act in an empathetic manner seems a given, whether we cloak that in the trappings of Christianity or not. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2017 16:35:41 GMT
Because christianity is ultimately authoritarian. God says "thou shalt not", but does not say why thou shalt not other than to say "because I'll send you to heaven if you don't and hell if you do". I don't think that's altogether fair on Christianity. The Golden Rule for instance is based on empathy and many Christians would fall back on that rather than the more authoritarian Ten Commandments. I mean I suppose you could argue that Jesus doesn't really explain why we should adhere to the Golden Rule, but then secular ethics are not really any better in that regard. That we should act in an empathetic manner seems a given, whether we cloak that in the trappings of Christianity or not. I think secular ethics are better in that regard. The basis for secular ethics is, IMO, evolutionary. We act in an empathetic manner not because some authority has told us to, but because we have evolved to do so as a social species. Evolution isn't an authority commanding us to be empathetic any more than gravity is an authority commanding us to fall down. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 2, 2017 17:00:01 GMT
You seem confused by the requirement.
You should already know what the evidence is, since evidence is the only thing that can lead you to know something exists.
So you tell me.
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point. You must know you aren't making any sense.
If you are being sincere, your point, whether you realize it, is that you don't believe in God because science hasn't proven it to your satisfaction yet..... You're not an atheist, I'm not even sure you're an agnostic because by relying on science (it's evolution and fallibility) you are accepting that there is a possibility/probability, however small, that God does exist. In essence, you don't believe in God yet. I actually think MOST atheists think like this. There are very few that claim that nothing could convince them that God exists. Examples have been offered before: everyone waking up one day and having the same dream where God revealed himself, the stars being re-arranged to spell out "I Am Here -- God" in different languages so everyone could understand it, miracles captured on film and documented by science that break known physical laws, any evidence for many of the various real-world claims various religions make (the efficacy of faith healing, or believers getting bitten by poisonous serpents and not dying). Pretty much all extant claims for God rely either on God of the Gaps, or irrational leaps from what is known to God being a cause. Most personal stories reflect extremely poor understandings of how evidence works on a fundamental level as well as the various cognitive biases human brains come riddled with. You mentioned the millions/billions of anecdotes out there; anecdotes are useful for establishing what people experience, not the cause of those experiences. Take something like NDEs where the best scientific research has connected much of common NDE experiences with brain activity, and cross-cultural research has revealed that people tend to experience the afterlife they expected to (because of their cultural background) before they died. Such research would suggest that NDEs aren't, as most claimed, evidence of them experience an afterlife, but rather evidence of them experience activities in the brain they don't normally experience. So with most anecdotes it's not the experience skeptics question, it's the claims for what the causes are. |
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Post by The Lost One on Mar 2, 2017 17:28:35 GMT
I think secular ethics are better in that regard. The basis for secular ethics is, IMO, evolutionary. We act in an empathetic manner not because some authority has told us to, but because we have evolved to do so as a social species. Evolution isn't an authority commanding us to be empathetic any more than gravity is an authority commanding us to fall down. The central question of ethics IMO is "do we ever have a duty to do things that may be to our personal disadvantage?" Social Darwinism may for instance say that is generally better to share. Evolution may have instilled in us a natural compulsion to share for that reason. But there could well be situations where I can get away without sharing, I would be materially better off not to share, and I can overcome any natural inclination to share or any guilt that would come from not sharing. So should I still share? We have to come up with some other compulsion to share beyond "it is generally beneficial to do so" (which is trivially true but doesn't apply to specific situations), "it is in your advantage to do so in this case" (which is not true) and "you feel you should share" (which doesn't matter as I find I can overcome any such feeling). If we cannot do that, I think ethics have to be abandoned as a nonsense. To put it another way, all ethical considerations for the naturalist seem to boil down to doing what will be to your advantage, taking into account the likelihood that those benefits might be outweighed by long-term costs (either due to others or living with your own guilt). Any duty higher than that is nonsense. But then what does adding an authority figure do to this? Well, it simply alters the long-term costs as now there are factors like potential divine punishment to consider or the added guilt of letting down an authority figure. But it still seems to mean all ethics is essentially an inconsistent application of general rules to long-term self interest. Any duty we feel beyond that is just that - a feeling. The conclusion seems to me then that whatever our beliefs, our ethics are simply based on how we feel and that can be as informed by religious and cultural institutions as evolution. Indeed the ethics of various cultures and religions can be explained in evolutionary terms too. The main difference between the secular and religious ethicist is that the latter will preserve general rules that are now somewhat at odds with how society has continued to evolve since their inception. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2017 17:49:42 GMT
I can certainly see the argument that adding an authority figure doesn't really remove the calculation you make, but rather just biases it in one direction or another. Which just goes to show the arguments that a divine authority is necessary to be false.
But it's the religious who claim that their system is inherently different because without it we have no basis for right and wrong. You seem to be arguing that this is false, and in that I agree with you. I'd argue that secular morality is better because it examines the considerations that we actually know are really there, rather than depending on considerations that may or may not be.
If I'm allowed to throw in "You should do X, because I say that the consequences for not doing X are infinite harm to you" then it automatically becomes true that one should do X, whatever it is - no argument against it is going to stack up to infinite harm, after all. But in secular morality we can then question whether there really is infinite harm, or any harm, in doing X. The theist has already taken on faith that the infinite harm does exist and will come as a result of X, merely because an authority has told them so.
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Post by franktjmackey on Mar 2, 2017 20:27:43 GMT
If you are being sincere, your point, whether you realize it, is that you don't believe in God because science hasn't proven it to your satisfaction yet..... You're not an atheist, I'm not even sure you're an agnostic because by relying on science (it's evolution and fallibility) you are accepting that there is a possibility/probability, however small, that God does exist. In essence, you don't believe in God yet. I actually think MOST atheists think like this. There are very few that claim that nothing could convince them that God exists. Examples have been offered before: everyone waking up one day and having the same dream where God revealed himself, the stars being re-arranged to spell out "I Am Here -- God" in different languages so everyone could understand it, miracles captured on film and documented by science that break known physical laws, any evidence for many of the various real-world claims various religions make (the efficacy of faith healing, or believers getting bitten by poisonous serpents and not dying). Pretty much all extant claims for God rely either on God of the Gaps, or irrational leaps from what is known to God being a cause. Most personal stories reflect extremely poor understandings of how evidence works on a fundamental level as well as the various cognitive biases human brains come riddled with. You mentioned the millions/billions of anecdotes out there; anecdotes are useful for establishing what people experience, not the cause of those experiences. Take something like NDEs where the best scientific research has connected much of common NDE experiences with brain activity, and cross-cultural research has revealed that people tend to experience the afterlife they expected to (because of their cultural background) before they died. Such research would suggest that NDEs aren't, as most claimed, evidence of them experience an afterlife, but rather evidence of them experience activities in the brain they don't normally experience. So with most anecdotes it's not the experience skeptics question, it's the claims for what the causes are. Then they aren't atheists. Most are Anti-God anyway IMO.... see Madalyn Murray OHair, and would reject any evidence, which was my point to the OP. Anecdotal evidence is still evidence, esp given the massive amount of it and that spirituality is a personal experience. Atheists demand evidence yet they wouldn't accept it and if some did ... others would demand different evidence etc... the problem is it doesn't work that way. God is not going to appear as a white bearded man or write in the stars. There is the concept of the Godhead or God consciousness, which is incomprehensible to the human mind, only when we progress to the spiritual realm can we begin to comprehend God. Abstract concepts like God is Love, God is Light and God is Life are not reducible to empirical double blind placebo studies. Demanding them is silly. Science, though, has started to describe other dimensions, but proving them with science could take millennia, in essence, waiting for science to catch up. I could sit here and demand all knowledge about planets in the universe with pictures and videos downloaded to a flash drive... I'll be waiting along time.What you referred to is the Dying Brain Hypothesis and it does not explain near death experiences that are similar with specificity across different cultures, or that people have had NDEs while being brain dead or that out of body perception has been verified, among others. Waving the dismissive hand of fallible (and political) science is just reflexive for people at this point. But as I suggested, the OP could try Iboga root or ayahuasca, as a practical matter of inquisition and choice. For those practitioners, the afterlife is a matter of experience, not belief or faith. He wasn't interested. |
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Post by The Lost One on Mar 2, 2017 21:42:07 GMT
But it's the religious who claim that their system is inherently different because without it we have no basis for right and wrong. You seem to be arguing that this is false, and in that I agree with you. Yeah pretty much. For some though it almost goes without saying that someone with as much authority as God would have should be obeyed, regardless of any punishments or rewards he might dish out. There's also the argument that goodness would actually be a thing if God existed as it would be equal to his will/nature as opposed to something no two people would agree on. Doing good would therefore perhaps have more concrete meaning and objectivity for the theist than it would for the naturalist. But I agree these aren't inherent differences. Whether we posit a God or not, we run into the is-ought problem. If there is a supreme authority figure who wants us to do X, ought we to do X? I'm not convinced. The problem is are we even really talking about ethics anymore as opposed to pragmatic cost-benefit analyses? Ethics to me is more emotional than that. For instance, if I were to walk past a drowning child I would want to try and help him, not for any cost-benefit reason (I'm sure there would be situations we can think of where we could argue it would be of greater benefit to me not to try and save him) but because I would just feel it is the right thing to do. There might be umpteen reasons why I feel that way - an evolutionary trait to protect the weak perhaps, maybe my Catholic upbringing, or perhaps I'm just naturally inclined to acts of kindness, or maybe I am egotistical and want to be thought of as a hero. Maybe a combination of all these things with a lot of other stuff going on in my head but none of them are really rational as such. Ethical considerations are always going to be irrational - any attempts to rationally define them, whether we appeal to God or evolution or whatever, are going to run into the is-ought problem. In the end it comes down to we do what we feel is right because we feel a duty to do so. And what we feel is right and our need to fulfil this duty are just as irrational for the secularist as the theist. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 3, 2017 17:29:31 GMT
I actually think MOST atheists think like this. There are very few that claim that nothing could convince them that God exists. Examples have been offered before: everyone waking up one day and having the same dream where God revealed himself, the stars being re-arranged to spell out "I Am Here -- God" in different languages so everyone could understand it, miracles captured on film and documented by science that break known physical laws, any evidence for many of the various real-world claims various religions make (the efficacy of faith healing, or believers getting bitten by poisonous serpents and not dying). Pretty much all extant claims for God rely either on God of the Gaps, or irrational leaps from what is known to God being a cause. Most personal stories reflect extremely poor understandings of how evidence works on a fundamental level as well as the various cognitive biases human brains come riddled with. You mentioned the millions/billions of anecdotes out there; anecdotes are useful for establishing what people experience, not the cause of those experiences. Take something like NDEs where the best scientific research has connected much of common NDE experiences with brain activity, and cross-cultural research has revealed that people tend to experience the afterlife they expected to (because of their cultural background) before they died. Such research would suggest that NDEs aren't, as most claimed, evidence of them experience an afterlife, but rather evidence of them experience activities in the brain they don't normally experience. So with most anecdotes it's not the experience skeptics question, it's the claims for what the causes are. Then they aren't atheists. Most are Anti-God anyway IMO.... see Madalyn Murray OHair, and would reject any evidence, which was my point to the OP. I'm not interested in the semantic debate of who/what is/isn't an atheist. Most now seem to agree with the soft/hard distinction anyway, or else the difference between atheist/theist referring simply to lack of belief/belief and gnostic/agnostic referring to knowledge/lack of knowledge. I'd say the majority of "atheists" are of the soft/agnostic variety. Anecdotes are evidence of an experience, not a cause. You ignored the part of my post where I explained this. It's rather odd that God won't do anything that most everyone would accept as evidence of his existence. He didn't seem to have this problem in the OT: lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprovable/ This is still ignoring the other examples I gave like believers surviving poisonous serpent bites, which is something The Bible claims. Inventing magical categories and then claiming they can't be proved or provide any empirical evidence for their existence is the strategy of the charlatan. It's healthy to be skeptical about all such claims because they're only limited by man's imagination. There's a reason most don't assume that everything we're capable of inventing or claiming is true. The cross-cultural similarities of NDEs are fewer than imagined and those similarities have been found to have neural causes. No NDEs have been reported during complete brain-death, in large part because it's nearly impossible to pin-point the time of an NDE to begin with giving that the person having it is not aware of time and those around them don't know when they're experiencing it. No Out-of-body perceptions have been verified; that's just a plain falsity. Most of the extant claims have been exaggerated if not proven outright false. At least one hospital set up a scrolling random text on top of a cabinet in their ER so that if any OBE occurred, the person could read the text. No confirmed readings yet. Lots of information on this here: infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html |
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Post by awhina on Mar 4, 2017 1:40:42 GMT
No, we just don't want to be reduced down to amoral swine, pure and simple. Amoral would be a major step up for a lot of theists. Because You say so? |
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Post by awhina on Mar 4, 2017 1:45:58 GMT
I actually think MOST atheists think like this. There are very few that claim that nothing could convince them that God exists They're all on this board? That's how it seems. As for your criticism of personal experience that we offer, what else do you realistically expect? You're all such egotists that you expect God to rearrange the stars to spell our Your name! (that one was yours, wasn't it?) Sorry, you are just not that important. God wouldn't kill billions of extra-terrestrials in order to convince J___ that he exists. |
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Post by franktjmackey on Mar 4, 2017 10:36:30 GMT
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Mar 4, 2017 12:55:19 GMT
Untrue. There have been plenty of totally ignored answers to appropriate questions. It's the questions that tend to be retarded. No one has tripped me up yet!  I just wanted to bump this quote from me to highlight how true it remains. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 5, 2017 17:18:12 GMT
I actually think MOST atheists think like this. There are very few that claim that nothing could convince them that God exists As for your criticism of personal experience that we offer, what else do you realistically expect? You're all such egotists that you expect God to rearrange the stars to spell our Your name! (that one was yours, wasn't it?) Again, personal experiences are evidence of experiences and not evidence for what caused them. The Bible offers plenty of empirical claims that should be scientifically testable: believers not buying from serpent bites, efficacy of prayer, Elijah and the Priests of Baal, etc. I never said God should re-arrange the stars "to spell my name" (again, this is evidence of your bad memory): I said rearrange them to spell "I Am here -- God" in a way that everyone could understand it. If He's God, then he's omnipotent, and could do this without destroying anything. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 5, 2017 17:39:52 GMT
IMO, many of them are Anti-God. I love it when Atheists get angry at being told they are going to hell. It's irony overload. This seems a complete non-sequitur response to what I said. Yes, there are anti-theist atheists out there; that's irrelevant to what I said. All you have is a baseless claim: "the spiritual is experiential." I could just as easily say that fairies are experiential. You can literally substitute "spiritual" or "fairies" for anything you could imagine. There's a good reason nobody should take such anti-evidential claims seriously. Science is the best method we have of studying and understanding reality. What we experience is a combination of what's external and how our brain processes it. Science can and does study this. Cognitive and neuroscience are robust fields that have already provided a lot of evidence into why we believe all kinds of false and stupid shit to begin with (I don't limit that category to religion, btw). This seems another non-sequitur to what I said. Mind telling me how the "believers won't die from serpent bite" was meant to be metaphoric? I mean, I can get that claim when it comes to the Genesis account of creation, but not straight-forward empirical claims like that. And even assuming it wasn't meant to be taken literally, what do you think the reason would be for offering what was, essentially, an example of a scientific experiment in order to prove whose God was real as in Elijah and the Priests of Baal? What billions accept isn't the evidence, but how their cognitive biases interpret it. Big difference. How does them being "descriptions of God dating back thousands of years" prevent them from being magical categories? If anything, descriptions of things from the age before modern science are MORE likely to be magical categories. IE, claims with no empirical or evidentiary basis that rely on vague and abstract terms. Saying "God is love" is precisely that. It's just a meaningless, baseless claim. And you keep ignoring the science and offering in its place anecdote, experience, argumentum ad populum, magical categories, and non-evidence. The link I provided already addressed all the cases in your first link, so you obviously didn't even read it. In addition to those cases, it incorporated cross-cultural studies that revealed just how big an impact cultural differences have on reported experiences. You apparently didn't read this either. Never mind that the entire field is dominated by charlatans and people who are biased towards believing they're literal from the start. Post some un-biased studies and then we can talk. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2017 18:32:40 GMT
You ignored the part of my post where I said that spirituality is experiential. Demanding empirical proof of intelligence existing before the universe, for example, is a silly conceit. The inability of science to comprehend something does not preclude its existence. If you don't want to use the scientific method to establish the existence of something, then what method would you use instead? And how does this method, whatever it is, distinguish between true statements and false statements? Magic is a phenomenon whose very existence is yet to be established. That seems like a necessary first step before we start trying to explain it. |
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Post by awhina on Mar 6, 2017 0:15:46 GMT
As for your criticism of personal experience that we offer, what else do you realistically expect? You're all such egotists that you expect God to rearrange the stars to spell our Your name! (that one was yours, wasn't it?) Again, personal experiences are evidence of experiences and not evidence for what caused them. The Bible offers plenty of empirical claims that should be scientifically testable: believers not buying from serpent bites, efficacy of prayer, Elijah and the Priests of Baal, etc. I never said God should re-arrange the stars "to spell my name" (again, this is evidence of your bad memory): I said rearrange them to spell "I Am here -- God" in a way that everyone could understand it. If He's God, then he's omnipotent, and could do this without destroying anything. Your ego is downright terrifying! God should do the impossible - re-arranging stellar cartography for the sake of You? Un-be-fracking-lievable. What makes J____ so important? |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2017 0:19:19 GMT
They don't. You won't hear their answers till they give up trying, then you accuse them of being close-minded when you're the close-minded one. (Trust me folks, I have this one on personal experience.)
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Mar 6, 2017 20:18:16 GMT
Again, personal experiences are evidence of experiences and not evidence for what caused them. The Bible offers plenty of empirical claims that should be scientifically testable: believers not buying from serpent bites, efficacy of prayer, Elijah and the Priests of Baal, etc. I never said God should re-arrange the stars "to spell my name" (again, this is evidence of your bad memory): I said rearrange them to spell "I Am here -- God" in a way that everyone could understand it. If He's God, then he's omnipotent, and could do this without destroying anything. God should do the impossible - re-arranging stellar cartography for the sake of You? 1. If he's God, it's not impossible. 2. Why the fuck do think it would be just for me? The entire point is to produce unambiguous evidence for EVERYONE! |
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