I don’t think I’ve ever found an empty toilet-paper roll in a public restroom. If I had, I think I would remember such a situation, so that proof wouldn’t work for me, either.
(Now it’ll happen over and over and over. . . .)
What?
It’s an analogy, not a comparison.
That’s a good point, but I’m not sure what to do about it, except hope that there aren’t sick fuck powerful beings out there that take an interest in us. Once one of them has (as in this hypothetical)…
Sure, but the point is that owning a dog, training it, and expecting it to follow your orders do not in and of themselves make one evil.
So, why couldn’t some more powerful being treat us the same way and still manage to avoid evilness?
Sure, but I was hypothesizing about some arbitrary powerful being. No reason to think it created us in any particular way.
Wouldn’t think it’d take much to make me believe, though apparantly it’s a lot more than has so far been brought forth.
‘Believing’ and ‘Accepting that there’s nothing I can do about it’ are two different things, however. Currently, all the gods I’ve heard of so far are on my shit list for being assholes, so it’s not like I’d greet them with open arms even if they DID show up on my french toast.
It can get as fucked as the Big G kind. “No Gods, No Masters!”
An analogy for what? What attribute of the dog-and-master relationship were you thinking of?
The closest a deity could get out of me is a belief that he’s a nice guy. I have no more inclination to worship a god than I do to worship my parents.
Dog owners didn’t create the dogs, and so just do what they think is a best way to train a dog to live in their household. A big difference from an all knowing supreme being.
If they abuse the dog they are fined or put in jail and the dog taken away from them, just like those who have dog fights!
I should have read your post first, this is basicly my quote. sorry about that.
Another thing about universe creators: No one would worship someone who can build a working rocket ship that could travel to Mars and back, someone who can build grand pianos, the best neurosurgeon in the world or even some guy who builds 19th-century steam locomotives in his garage for kicks.
They have the intelligence, the wherewithal, to do so. I’m envious of all of them. So a so-called god who could create the universe and run it — such as it is — would have the intelligence and whatever else it would take to do so. What’s the big deal? It wouldn’t be godlike to the so-called god, any more than tying a shoelace is to us.
I am sure a great being like god could come up with a way to prove to all that he/she/it exists. Since it has never happened, that suggests he/she/it does not exist. The whole atheism thing could have been ended a long time ago.
Apologies if I’m leapfrogging discussion already in thread, but I skimmed. 
For myself: this would depend on the definition of “believe in God.” It wouldn’t be terribly hard for me to believe in a powerful, greater-than-human entity. If a being showed up, did some magicy stuff and whatnot, and I had some evidence that I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating, I’d believe the entity existed, most likely.
That wouldn’t entail me believe it was big-G “God,” beginning and end of the universe, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-everything. I certainly wouldn’t assume it meant an afterlife. The All-God just seems…conceptually silly. It’s like believing in a geocentric universe – a sort of comfortable lie that makes everything seem a little more graspable and intuitive. I don’t believe truth exists to make me comfortable. The closest I could imagine is finding out that “the universe” is itself some sort of quasi-conscious entity existing in a universe of universes. This doesn’t sound IMPOSSIBLE, but I’m still not sure that I’d consider that entity “God” any more than I’d assume one of my pancreatic cells to consider me its deity.
Despite the focus of religion on deity, I think the afterlife is the far more important bit. I don’t believe there’s any easy way to “convince” me one exists, unless there’s some way to “show” me a real afterlife without killing me.
I love this analogy. I think the obvious retort would be, “But there’s only ONE God, and only ONE universe, and ONLY God could create it.”
But…why bother tying the shoelace if there’s nowhere to walk to?
Intelligence, reason, power, or any of the many ways in which humans are more capable than dogs.
In general it seems incredibly arrogant to assume that we have any reasonable ability to reason about the morality of a being so much more capable than we are. If a dog had a limited ability to reason about our motives, what might it think about them? Obedience training might seem like petty tyranny and arbitrary punishment. Why is it so important that I come when you call or stick out my paw when you command. But we know that obedience training in general is very important. Maybe learning to “shake” isn’t pivotal, but obedience in general is very important to keep us living in harmony with dogs and to protect them.
Humans are actually pretty bad at moral reasoning. We’re not particularly consistent. We fall for all sorts of silly fallacies. We give different answers when questions are posed slightly differently. Is it so hard to believe that some other being might be more capable than us? So hard to imagine that we might not fully understand something, and that we might mistakenly interpret its motives?
Well, I hate to answer your question with a question, but why do you need *me *to believe? In the grand scheme of things, what’s the significance of my belief (or lack thereof)?
That’s a really good question that I’ve never actually thought to ask the people who seem to have trouble with me being an atheist. As I’ve said before, they generally don’t believe I’m an evil Satan’s-cabana-boy, instead they judge me not to be a real atheist because I’m a nice guy and apparently atheists just can’t be nice guys. Anyway, I usually go into a whole thing about what it means or doesn’t mean to be an atheist, but I’ve never dug deeper to find out why they care.
Intelligence and reasoning do not work the way you think they do. If a creature of human intelligence can recognise that murdering your son because a powerful jerk asks you to is morally wrong, it’s reasonably safe to assume a creature of “infinite” intelligence will generally reach the same conclusion. Once you’re smart enough to reason yourself into the general vicinity of the right answer, getting even smarter isn’t going to make you veer off into crazytown. As for power… do you really believe in the idea of “Might makes right” as a moral statement?
It’s intellectual cowardice to assume we don’t. For example, torturing someone to death for shits and giggles is wrong. If a powerful magical being starts torturing people to death for shits and giggles, the correct answer is not “Oh, I’m sure it must have a good reason for it.”
Morality is a human term. If we as humans decide that a god is immoral, then it is immoral.
And if a being is that much smarter than us and that incomprehensible, then it’s foolish to trust any claims it makes about being moral even by its own standards. We can’t tell if it’s telling the truth or not.
Morality is not majority rules. Homosexuality was never immoral, for instance, no matter how many people thought it was.
And what do we demand from our pets? Merely simple obedience to certain rules. Is that what is expected of us by a god? Yes, from the dog’s point of view, we are operating a petty dictatorship. Do we accept that from a god, merely because that god has the ability to impose that dictatorship?
I don’t think anyone has answered this question properly: Assuming that a godlike being appears, what is it exactly that we are supposed to accept about this god? Is it merely that we accept the superhuman abilities? Or are we being asked to accept something else – benevolence, righteousness, morality, whatever. Given a demonstration of raw power, what else is that meant to imply?
No, it is not hard to imagine that we might encounter a being whose motives we misunderstand. But we have nothing else to rely on except our own ability to reason. Surrendering that reason simply because a being with superhuman abilities has appeared on the scene is unacceptable. If that being can’t make us understand his or her moral reasoning, then it’s not our failure.
Whether homosexuality is immoral depends on the definition of moral being applied by the person doing the judging. Under some rubrics of morality, homosexuality is immoral. The fact that people can change their minds about moral standards doesn’t mean that there is some external being in control of a “real” morality. I mean, what happens if the majority of people suddenly decide that homosexuality is immoral again? Will you argue that “oh, it was immoral all along, regardless of what a bunch of people were thinking a few years ago.”
How the hell can you read what I wrote and come to the conclusion that my position is the exact opposite to what I posted? Homosexuality is not immoral, no matter how many people think it is. If the majority of people decide that homosexuality is immoral, the majority of people are wrong.
No, that’s exactly the point. We decide individually whether homosexual is immoral, based on our personal standards of morality. Whether homosexuality is immoral or not is not a universal truth, because morality is not a universal truth.
So long as you can forward a coherent explanation of your moral standards and explain in a reasonable way why your views on the morality of homosexuality follow logically from that standard, you are not wrong. What is wrong is a superpowered entity walking into the room and saying “Homosexuality is immoral and I know that the moral standards I’m setting forth don’t logically lead to that conclusion, but that’s just because I’m smarter than you and you are incapable of understanding true morality.” That’s wrong.