That may not be your thoughtful intention, but that’s the dance you’re dancing, whethre you know who’s calling the tune and why, or not.
Why does God get special treatment here over all other truth claims? If I have a belief about any other metaphysical question is that a religion too? No. But if I happen to doubt the claim, advanced by someone else, that there is an intelligent transcendent overbeing, suddenly I’m an adherent of a “religion.” That makes absolutely no sense.
The part where agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. Belief and knowledge are not the same issues.
If you tell me that you don’t know whether God exists or not, then I’ll call you an agnostic. But I can still then go on to ask whether or not you believe in God.
You know, do I have to actually get into this with you too?
Let’s forget the chatty arguments for a second. Don’t you think it’s REALLY FUCKING DICK to imply that just because we don’t happen to share your particular metaphysical beliefs, that we don’t care about other people, our loved ones, and don’t think anything matters. Isn’t that just about as low as someone could possibly get in a philosophical debate? I know you probably didn’t mean it that way: but chances are that’s just because you never really thought about the implications of what you’re saying about the person you’re talking to.
Maybe you don’t. Maybe I should give you the benefit of the doubt. But try to empathize. If someone walked into your mother’s funeral and said “why do you care? You don’t believe your mother has a magical earth godess imbued with the power of Grayskull, which is all that really matters, so why would you care?” wouldn’t you think that person was a heartless bastard? Do I really need to justify to you in detail why I loved my mother? I mean, if I asked you, would your answer be “because God told me to” or would you just raise an eyebrow.
And yet you and Shodan seem to not only think it’s chuckalicious, but that you have some sort of superior rationale for why you care about the lives and well beings of others.
I know you think your concept of the soul makes sense. But to me, it seems just as utterly arbitrary as anything else, and accomplishes nothing insofar as explaining why this or that action is moral or immoral, why should care or not care. Why do you care that something has a soul and something else doesn’t? What argument can you make as to why you should care, if you don’t. I mean, sure, you might believe that there is a God that is all powerful that commands you to think that that’s important, but none of that has any emotional or moral content to it just as bold assertions. You might coldly do what your God wants, perhaps out of a desire to avoid punishment or self-preservation (but then, that’s already cheating, because even, those, as small and selfish as they might be as motives, are values, and we haven’t established or justified those yet).
It’s only when you already have some sort of internal value to begin with that any of that has any meaning. Only if you first, at the very least, CARE about God and God’s desires and commands and instructions, then maybe you can indirectly find reason to care about the lives of anyone else. That might be indirect and still somewhat sociopathic, but it’s at least closer. And most likely, the reality is that you just DO care about other people. In fact, it’s probably only because what you’ve heard and read about what God has to say matches up with this human caring that you even think this particular account of existence, these particular God beliefs, is good, not the other way around. If God said to rape and pillage, you’d dump that God on the spot and go look for another. The question is, why?
Well, guess what: we nonbelievers are no different. We’re just people. From your perspective you might have a trite extra name for us: atheists, agnostics, whatever. But we’re just people, and that perspective: that we’re something different, seems bizarre. We started out caring, just like everyone else. And then believers came to US with these claims about God, not the other way around. The only difference is that we don’t happen to find the claims about there being a God very compelling, and so don’t see reason to take that particular leap. We don’t see how it’s necessary or really adds anything further or helpful to where we all began.
I have friends that are religious, and friends that aren’t. When people die, however, despite their supposed different belief systems, I don’t really see much difference in how people deal with loss. No one has to refer to souls or whatever to justify the fact that someone they loved and cared about is gone, or if its someone else, empathize with how terrible that must be. No one spends time discussing who’s ontology justifies a superior rationale for caring.
And I suspect that no one, if told by their Preist or even directly by God himself that there was an accident, that God had forgotten to put a soul in this particular person, would have any clue what to make of that information, and it wouldn’t change how they felt about the person in question one iota: largely because the whole terminology of souls is emotionally meaningless in the end. No one really knows what it means in the first place, so being told that its gone means little if there is no other change in the person in question. They’d still care about them just the same, not treat them like a worm. If they did think that, we’d all think that something had gone horribly unhinged in THEM, not in the person supposedly missing their soul.
