Religion Religion, Secularism, and Morality

[ShieldWife]

The problem here, is that atheism is not a neutral point. Agnosticism is a neutral belief point, 'I don't know whether or not the divine exists.' Atheism is a proactive belief that there is no god, and that has theological, philosophical, and moral consequences.

If it were a lack of belief, that would be very different, but it is not. Atheism is the active rejection of the divine, and when this is carried out to its logical conclusion, totalitarianism is the result.

This is incorrect. Atheism is not a positive assertion of anything. It is the lack of belief in god or gods. Nothing more. If someone came up to you and said that they had seen a fairy, you likely wouldn’t believe them, but probably couldn‘t say with absolute certainty that there are no fairies and that the person didn’t see them. So too are atheists unconvinced about the existence of deities. Atheists (at least the vast majority of us) don’t believe in deities, but we can say with absolute certainty that none exist because having only finite knowledge and perceptions, we cannot make such a universal claim. Likewise, I cannot say with absolute certainty that there are no purple unicorns in the universe, though I can say that I don’t believe in purple unicorns as I have no evidence of them.

Some people make the distinction between so called “agnostic atheists” who don’t believe in god(s) but can’t be sure, with “gnostic atheists” who claim certainty that that there are no gods. Using that definition, I’m an agnostic atheist, but so are almost all self proclaimed atheists.

 

[Terthna]

This is incorrect. Atheism is not a positive assertion of anything. It is the lack of belief in god or gods. Nothing more. If someone came up to you and said that they had seen a fair, you likely wouldn’t believe them, but probably couldn‘t say with absolute certainty that there are no fairies and that the person didn’t see them. So too are atheists unconvinced about the existence of deities. Atheists (at least the vast majority of us) don’t believe in deities, but we can say with absolute certainty that none exist because having only finite knowledge and perceptions, we cannot make such a universal claim. Likewise, I cannot say with absolute certainty that there are no purple unicorns in the universe, though I can say that I don’t believe in purple unicorns as I have no evidence of them.

Some people make the distinction between so called “agnostic atheists” who don’t believe in god(s) but can’t be sure, with “gnostic atheists” who claim certainty that that there are no gods. Using that definition, I’m an agnostic theist, but so are almost all self proclaimed atheists.

See, this is why I can't take discussing this subject seriously anymore; nobody can agree on anything when it comes to religion. Case in point; as an agnostic theist and former atheist myself, I basically disagree with everything ShieldWife just said. I assert that atheists are making a positive assertion that god does not exist (or at least every atheist I've ever seen has), and their beliefs are as far from agnostic theism as those belonging to any other organized religion.

An agnostic theist believes in the existence of some form of higher power, but also that it is impossible for us to know anything about it. Therefor, anyone who asserts anything about what that higher power is, or what it wants, is just straight up lying to you; and quite possibly themselves as well.

 

[Simonbob]

I think I have a different idea.

I think most people need something like Religion, not because it's true, but because most people are stupid. They need something immense, unavoidable, unbeatable, to keep them in line, because they're to dumb to do it themselves.


Note, I'm an atheist myself. I know there's no real law, nothing that will keep me in line, except getting caught. I'm not a criminal, in part because I'm lazy, and in part because staying mostly within the law is easy. There are few things I care enough about to take even moderate risks. Enlightened self-interested pragmatism, that's it.


Only the Faithful know they'll be judged. They can't avoid it. It's true, of all faiths. They will be judged. Thus, they care.

 

[Terthna]

I think I have a different idea.

I think most people need something like Religion, not because it's true, but because most people are stupid. They need something immense, unavoidable, unbeatable, to keep them in line, because they're to dumb to do it themselves.


Note, I'm an atheist myself. I know there's no real law, nothing that will keep me in line, except getting caught. I'm not a criminal, in part because I'm lazy, and in part because staying mostly within the law is easy. There are few things I care enough about to take even moderate risks. Enlightened self-interested pragmatism, that's it.


Only the Faithful know they'll be judged. They can't avoid it. It's true, of all faiths. They will be judged. Thus, they care.

Or, in other words; most people would fail the pain box test:

 

[ShieldWife]

See, this is why I can't take discussing this subject seriously anymore; nobody can agree on anything when it comes to religion. Case in point; as an agnostic theist and former atheist myself, I basically disagree with everything ShieldWife just said. I assert that atheists are making a positive assertion that god does not exist (or at least every atheist I've ever seen has), and their beliefs are as far from agnostic theism as those belonging to any other organized religion.

An agnostic theist believes in the existence of some form of higher power, but also that it is impossible for us to know anything about it. Therefor, anyone who asserts anything about what that higher power is, or what it wants, is just straight up lying to you; and quite possibly themselves as well.

I’ve only ever seen one or two self professed atheists claim to have absolute certainty that no gods exist, compared to scores of atheists I have seen who say that they can’t know for sure.

Unless a poster comes here and says that they are an atheists and that they are certain that no gods exist, I consider the claim to atheists assert that there are no gods to be a straw man.

Also, I’m not sure how much it matters, but I made a typo in my last post, I am an agnostic atheist, not an agnostic theist.

 

[Simonbob]

Unless a poster comes here and says that they are an atheists and that they are certain that no gods exist, I consider the claim to atheists assert that there are no gods to be a straw man.

While I can't say for certain, I'm pretty sure. There's no God, no supernatural.

We're all alone, in the Dark.


But, hey. I've been wrong before.

 

[DocSolarisReich]

I am pretty sure that with what I have heard from your arguments with other Christians that would mean you have no rights in that regard. According to them, you are plenty in error. And what I am getting at was the needless slaughter of innocent people, regardless of their professed faith.

Innocent of what? Everyone that lives, lives at the expense of massacres of the past. It’s time to to stop counting piles of bodies as if that is a measure of the moral high ground. This is gay.

 

[Terthna]

I’ve only ever seen one or two self professed atheists claim to have absolute certainty that no gods exist, compared to scores of atheists I have seen who say that they can’t know for sure.

Unless a poster comes here and says that they are an atheists and that they are certain that no gods exist, I consider the claim to atheists assert that there are no gods to be a straw man.

Also, I’m not sure how much it matters, but I made a typo in my last post, I am an agnostic atheist, not an agnostic theist.

All I can speak from is my own personal experience, but fair enough; on both counts.

 

[Hlaalu Agent]

Innocent of what? Everyone that lives, lives at the expense of massacres of the past. It’s time to to stop counting piles of bodies as if that is a measure of the moral high ground. This is gay.

Well the Catholics were innocent of being Cathars for one... And then we should count the bodies, so that we can better appreciate what we have today and what it has cost us. If that is gay, well I better bulk up and start JoJo posing.

 

[DocSolarisReich]

Well the Catholics were innocent of being Cathars for one... And then we should count the bodies, so that we can better appreciate what we have today and what it has cost us. If that is gay, well I better bulk up and start JoJo posing.

If there were Catholics at Beziers and died in a state of Grace, they went to their eternal reward. Death is far from the worst thing that can happen to a Catholic.

 

[Captain X]

I am not a good person because I fear punishment from either some deity or "the man" as it were, but because I wish to be. I used to be quite the rambunctious little troublemaker as a kid - a "wild Indian" as my first grade teacher called me. So what changed between then and later on when I strove to be what I thought of as a good person? It wasn't religion. I was baptised and raised a Lutheran, and later confirmed and became a full member of my church, so religion was always there in my life. I honestly can't even tell you what made me want to change beyond respect in my parents. Yes, partly this was because of corporal punishment - I was spanked, and often with the use of a belt (it even had a name and I would be commanded to retrieve it) - but not entirely. Initially there was resentment, and I am certainly stubborn and continue to be, but I did come to see what my parents meant and strove to be better behaved. Eventually I developed my own sense of morality which was based not only on what my parents taught me, but also on what I learned from other important figures in my life. This is basically true of everyone, it's just that religious people attribute this to faith rather than seeing that it is still just being taught to them by others around them.

 

[LordsFire]

The entire point of machine learning and evolutionary design is that this provably untrue, and unintelligent procedure can generate solutions wildly beyond available designers in a practical timeframe. They are a legitimate implementation of the "Chimps on Typewriters" hypothetical, where artificially constructed agents just barely capable of the basic kind of behavior you want are repeatedly thrown at the wall and iterated from the best performance until you end up with a solid answer.

We also have Fermi estimates, where blatant guesswork has a startling ability to generate useful answers from far too little information to call it proper reasoning. And the mind-twisting quantum "dice" making a solid case that the universe actually does have literal dumb luck built right into its basic functions.

You mean machines designed by intelligent people, and programmed by intelligent people, to come to specific ends, can give out useful intelligible results? Intelligible results that only the intelligent designers can discern as 'this is what I wanted,' whereas the process if left to continue, would just keep iterating because a dumb mechanical process does not have a way of knowing it has achieved a useful result?

Color me shocked!

This does not support the position of the materialistic atheist. If anything, it damages it.

Here:


Have a professional chemist explain to you the absurdity of naturalistic abiogenesis. I linked it to a point where he starts demonstrating the complexity involved in something vastly similar than an entire cell, but the whole video hammers the point home again, and again, and again. Statistical odds on the order of 10^79,000,000,000. That's all the matter in the universe (counted in atoms) with another BILLION ZEROES added on.

Abiogenesis is a religious doctrine, not science. It is in point of fact anti-scientific. Since the time of Darwin, the improbability of evolution has only become more and more apparent.

Yes, axioms are a bitch and a half to get to stick, can you cease to insist that your axiomatic acceptance of a specific form of the supernatural must be valid when it comes with an enormous pile of riders that aren't actually universal to religions? Many Asian faiths and the most famous of pre-Christian polytheism have fuck-all notion that the divine are intrinsically privileged moral actors, they are to be deferred to primarily due to retribution by naked force.

Christianity is an exceptionally logically poor ethics system, because the foundation of the morality requires vast swaths of justifications and elaborations to have legitimacy. An omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient creator being is not logically compatible with a "fallen world" without insane philosophical contortions.

Zoroastrianism resolves the problem by having an equal opponent responsible for the wrongs of the world. Islam resolves the problem by actually saying that pure good is against Allah's wishes because it precludes desired actions. Polytheistic faiths don't have this issue to begin with because they don't have all-encompassing creators, the "first cause" just gets the ball rolling and is otherwise limited in some fashion.

I'm not arguing about what other religious worldviews teach regarding morality. I'm arguing that atheism is morally bankrupt, because it has no foundation for morality. I'm not going to pursue this further right now, because that'd distract from the point of the thread.

I am not a good person because I fear punishment from either some deity or "the man" as it were, but because I wish to be. I used to be quite the rambunctious little troublemaker as a kid - a "wild Indian" as my first grade teacher called me. So what changed between then and later on when I strove to be what I thought of as a good person? It wasn't religion. I was baptised and raised a Lutheran, and later confirmed and became a full member of my church, so religion was always there in my life. I honestly can't even tell you what made me want to change beyond respect in my parents. Yes, partly this was because of corporal punishment - I was spanked, and often with the use of a belt (it even had a name and I would be commanded to retrieve it) - but not entirely. Initially there was resentment, and I am certainly stubborn and continue to be, but I did come to see what my parents meant and strove to be better behaved. Eventually I developed my own sense of morality which was based not only on what my parents taught me, but also on what I learned from other important figures in my life. This is basically true of everyone, it's just that religious people attribute this to faith rather than seeing that it is still just being taught to them by others around them.

If you don't care about logical coherency to your moral system, sure, you can just go off of cultural inertia. It does, however, mean that you're giving up pursuit of truth in favor of what is comfortable or expedient.

Also, Christian morality isn't based on fear of punishment. That so many 20th century christian institutions taught such nonsense has been a massive failing on the part of the church, and frankly a key part of why Christianity was driven out of the centerpiece of western culture. To a large degree, that was deserved, because it stopped teaching the gospel, which is based upon Love, and instead started teaching fear-mongering and jockeying for social status.

That religious institutions fell down on the job, however, does not change the truth, any more than gravity would stop working if secular schools start teaching that it's false.

 

[ATP]

If there were Catholics at Beziers and died in a state of Grace, they went to their eternal reward. Death is far from the worst thing that can happen to a Catholic.

Death is not worst that could happen to anybody.
Back to topic - Buddha,Chineese masters,Marx tried to made atheism working.All we get - new religions.It is established fact now,that religion could not be erased,only changed.

 

[Zachowon]

It should be noted that Rome was most successful before they became Christian.

And a lot of things corrupt every religion. No religion stays the same throughout its whole time, and Christianity definitely has been one of the most changes

 

[Cherico]

thought this would help

 

[Morphic Tide]

Intelligible results that only the intelligent designers can discern as 'this is what I wanted,' whereas the process if left to continue, would just keep iterating because a dumb mechanical process does not have a way of knowing it has achieved a useful result?

Intelligible results that continually get more useful. The designers do not know what they want in particular, they have a problem to solve and make something else to come up with the solution. The design itself is not an intelligent process, the intelligent involvement is establishing the system that creates ever-better answers and deciding when it's good enough. The initial state has little, if any, resemblance to the final result.

Just because you need an intelligent actor to discern the process was successful does not mean the process isn't happening without one. The created unintelligent designer creates a successful design, then the intelligent actor uses it.

Statistical odds on the order of 10^79,000,000,000. That's all the matter in the universe (counted in atoms) with another BILLION ZEROES added on.

You might have those odds from life originating in one immediate freak accident. We literally have not figured out how to build life from raw chemistry in a lab yet, let alone how it'd have happened naturally (which, mind you, is that man's primary argument), and each function that happens by random chance makes others more likely as you have more of the components interacting with eachother. The Earth had billions of years, the low estimates are billions of earth-like planets per galaxy, there are billions upon billions upon billions of galaxies in the observable universe.

The argument about the insane complexity where you timestamped the video starts with how describing the result with scientific confidence is nightmarish, and the fact you have to go back to the start if you get one thing wrong. Except you're not going "back to the start", you have all the world's oceans constantly undergoing variations for hundreds of millions of years at the least, easily thousands of attempts on components per square meter every fraction of a second, and every square meter constantly shifting conditions.

That video is entirely "Nobody knows, therefor God". He brings up how nuclei and mitochondria have yet more dissimilarly of cell membranes from the already heterogenous main cellular membrane, completely ignoring how this undermines his point about homogenous lipids being used for testing because dislike lipids still can form together anyways, and also makes no mention of the symbiosis theory that's established for mitochondria by them having their own nucleus and protein assembly.

Abiogenesis is a religious doctrine, not science. It is in point of fact anti-scientific. Since the time of Darwin, the improbability of evolution has only become more and more apparent.

Abiogenisis in particular has gotten more frustratingly mind-melting to pin down because avenues of approach keep turning out wrong because as it turns out backtracking things billions of years is a rather astonishingly difficult task, but evolution in existing life has only gotten more firm because we keep finding more intermediate stages and locating more examples of mutations proliferating in populations to cause them to be more adapted to their environment.

If it's provably true for life around now, able to be quite readily inferred with high logical coherence for billions of years back in increasingly-scarce bits and pieces, why wouldn't it keep going back to the start?

 

[King Arts]

I’ve only ever seen one or two self professed atheists claim to have absolute certainty that no gods exist, compared to scores of atheists I have seen who say that they can’t know for sure.

Unless a poster comes here and says that they are an atheists and that they are certain that no gods exist, I consider the claim to atheists assert that there are no gods to be a straw man.

Also, I’m not sure how much it matters, but I made a typo in my last post, I am an agnostic atheist, not an agnostic theist.

The most famous historical atheists in power are ones who state with certainty there is no God someone who is not devout but thinks there is no God but isn’t sure will just live and let live. But the communists and before that Robespierre ilk who wanked off the concept of reason forced people and gin and bayonet point to be atheists and stop believing in a god. That means they think they are pretty sure.

 

[ATP]

The most famous historical atheists in power are ones who state with certainty there is no God someone who is not devout but thinks there is no God but isn’t sure will just live and let live. But the communists and before that Robespierre ilk who wanked off the concept of reason forced people and gin and bayonet point to be atheists and stop believing in a god. That means they think they are pretty sure.

Well,communist and Robespierre were installing another religion,so it not count as atheism.

 

[ParadiseLost]

Well,communist and Robespierre were installing another religion,so it not count as atheism.

Any argument that communism or rationalism is a religion makes atheism a religion as well.

 

[ShieldWife]

Communism may not be a religion, but it is an ideology and belief system, which atheism is not. Atheism isn’t anything, it can’t motivate or prohibit behavior like a religion, philosophy, or other ideology. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it's an ethos.