OK, lets say that this natural law was “real”, but we don’t know what the laws are. How does their existence make any difference if is never revealed? How can it affect people’s moral beliefs if they don’t know what the natural law is?
In fact let’s assume the natural law is “never wear the same clothes two days in a row”. OK, we have a very clear natural law but no one knows about it. How does that affect peoples behavior? What difference does it make if the natural law exists or not?
I’ll agree with that. I’ll also opine that most atheists are grumpier on average.
Those two concepts are pretty much identical. The only difference is the reason they modify their beliefs; the first follows their moral compass because they believe it to be the right thing to do based on a combination of how they were raised, how they themselves wish to be treated, and how they observe people treating others. The second also follows their moral compass because they believe it to be the right thing to do, but believe it to be the right thing to do because God told them so, and they were raised to obey God and follow His word through the teachings of the bible.
If you were to take an average atheist and an average theist and ask them about their moral code avoiding any questions of religion or the reasons for their code, it’s probable you wouldn’t be able to tell who’s who.
But this is not a discussion of how one came by their morals.
The burden of proof for any claim is on the person that makes that claim. If I tell you that unicorns exist, I’d better be able to produce a unicorn if I expect you to take me seriously. If I fail to produce one, but instead haul out a pile of anecdotal evidence in the form of stories and papers from other people who claim to have seen one once and testimony from people who believe in them even though they’ve never seen one, I might be able to impress upon you the possibility that unicorns exist, however remote or unlikely, but that’s not proof by any standard.
Agnosticism is merely the belief in the possibility – or if you prefer, a refusal to discount the possibility in its entirety or believe in it without further evidence. You might say that an agnostic is in the process of analyzing a theory but doesn’t have enough information yet one way or the other to come down on either side of the fence. What’s wrong with that?
I once counted myself agnostic before my brain had matured enough to develop the necessary critical thinking skills to make up my mind. Once it had though, I came down on the atheist side because no proof existed in any form to convince me of the existence of any sort of supreme being, and it was an almost absolute certainty that none would ever be forthcoming.
:eek:
May Iluvatar forgive you for that…
This sounds like a straw man to me. I don’t really know anyone who goes around saying “there is not possibly an intelligent entity beyond our current understanding” - there’s a lot of mystery yet in our understanding of the universe.
When it comes to the specific idea of “people in my culture hundreds or thousands of years ago gave me this information about a magic guy who sits in the clouds and made the earth the center of the universe” then it’s easier to dismiss. Can I prove that’s not the case? Well, you might be able to make a logical case out of the inconsistent beliefs of the religion, or examine the logical implications of those beliefs like “God created us to worship him, but refuses to show himself or give us any evidence of his existance” - but in a hard, conclusive way, no, you can’t really disprove it.
When you look at why religions start, that people need some sense of purpose in life, and some prescientific explanation about the mysteries of the world, and from the perspective of the higher ups, a way to control your society, it becomes obvious why religious have sprung up across all of humanity. It’s a psychological phoenomina that would crop up over and over again even if God didn’t exist. So there’s no reason to assume that any religion has any truth to it. They would exist even without the presnce of god. Religions live and die, expand and contract, based on the power of the culture that created them, rather than any analysis of which is more likely to be correct.
So, without any evidence, are any of them at all likely to be true? I can’t say for sure that Greek polytheism or Aztec batshittery or modern religions are untrue, in the same way that I can’t say that an invisible unicorn isn’t giving me a psychic hoofjob right now, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that any of those belief systems are true. We can fully explain their existance without the need of any god or anything supernatural, there’s no evidence that they have any substance to them, and their gods take no detectable actions in our world.
So I can’t say “no intelligent entity that we don’t undestand exists”, but it’s almost certainly true that you can say “no particular religion’s beliefs about a bearded guy in the sky, or an array of battling invisible gods has any reasonable chance of being right.”
Agnostics are just people who don’t want to call themselves atheists because the term atheism is so reviled in our society and agnostic sounds somehow nicer. Or I’ve also seen the term used to describe people who don’t belong to a major religion but have silly supernatural beliefs anyway.
The agnostic you describe is effectively an atheist.
Yeah, no, I can’t buy this. You can make this stupid argument about anything. “We can’t know anything for sure, therefore every possibility is equally valid!” is just a philosophical circle jerk.
In the absense of evidence, isn’t the logical course of action to not make shit up and then believe it?
Yeah, this a cop out. This is the equivelant of just saying “NO U” or “WRONG” or something at the end of the post. Explain why I was wrong, or even explain why my thinking here resembles in any way a fundamentalist. My post was quite the opposite of what you accuse me of - but of course if you consider atheism “just another religion” then you’d say atheism advocacy is preaching the same way as anyone else. But it’s a stupid position to be working from.
I think I’m somewhat confused about what you’re actually arguing for. That last sentence sounds pretty much like what I’ve been trying to get across so far – that disbelief is the default option (disbelief, if that’s where we clash, doesn’t constitute belief in the opposite, to me). However, previously you seemed to be saying that it doesn’t matter whether one believes or not, that both belief and disbelief are on equal footing, that the only possible answer is a non-committal ‘maybe’. That’s pretty much the exact opposite, and a position that, to me, precludes any kind of scientific reasoning at all.
I suspect those who loudly proclaim to believe in god have doubts. There is zero proof, they know that. Deep down they must know they are in self delusion. That is especially true for the strident ones. It seems they are trying to convince themselves more than the people they are addressing. I feel a little bit sorry for them.
God arrives, gathers the masses around him and intones, in a booming voice:
“Behold, I will prove my power by creating fire by just rubbing this stick against this box.”
Someone coughs and said, “Dude, you arrived, about 6,000 years too late.”
“Shit,” says God. “That’s what happens when you live outside of time. I knew I should have turned right at 500 BC.”
I can be convinced, but it would take a lot to do it.
I doubt that anything could convince me of the typical version of God since the idea in itself makes little logical sense. And, it reeks of dishonesty; if a superbeing showed up and, say, told me I had to suffer for some plan that a mere human conveniently can’t understand, my reaction is going to be “Suuuuure :rolleyes:.” The standard version of God looks too much like what it is; a con job. If “God” showed up and started performing superhuman feats to prove that it was God, my reaction would be that it was a superhuman con artist of some kind.
And even for less outright incoherent versions of God, I can’t see anything pushing a sensible person past agnosticism. How, after all can we tell the difference between a “god” and something that is merely powerful enough to utterly fool us? Once something reaches the minimum power needed so that we can’t see past any deception it makes, we can’t really be sure of anything about it.
And then there’s the problem of definitions. If an immensely powerful alien from another universe created this one, is it God? I wouldn’t call it God even if it showed up, but others would.
Don’ we know what happens when God or prophets show up? I mean God smited a bunch of Egyptians with some pretty impressive feats and they still didn’t become Jews. Jesus came and did a bunch of miracles and there are still Jews. Joseph Smith talked with angels in the US and yet there are still Baptists. I think you religious people are pretty stubborn. Don’t you listen when God speaks?
I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but here we go again.
What would it take for me to believe that the Christian(or any other all-powerful) God exists?
An all-powerful deity would know exactly what it would take.
'Cos he’d grab ya and squeeeeze ya until you told him, right?
Knowing is not the same as caring. What makes you think any individual is worthy of notice by an omnipotent being? Does the Holy Checklist read:
If my name ain’t on the list somewhere, then fuck him. He doesn’t care about me, and I don’t care about him.
But I’ll go with there’s no list.
Religion is a belief system. Religion is certainly not a tool. This makes no sense at all.
Religion is a tool and a belief system. These two things are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, because religion is a belief system that relies on faith rather than evidence, it is an extremely effective tool.
Oh yes, the other dumb thing about 99% of atheists (at least the ones who constantly proselytize about their beliefs as being the only true ones) is that they are constantly running around crying “Where’s the proof? Where’s the proof?” as if that is dispositive. Plenty of people have had religious experiences that they would consider to be strong evidence of the veracity of their religion. The key is that you don’t believe that they are interpreting their experiences correctly. You believe this because they are obviously not rational given that they believe they have had religious experiences, which is a nice little exercise in circular logic. It makes it much easier to dismiss any discussion of religion as nothing more than wanking.
There’s a great wealth of intelligent thought and discussion out there. Ignoring it in favor of of smug, sarcastic and trite little logic “proofs” does nothing more than convince well-educated people that you are on the same level as some drunk theatre major expounding about the meaning of it all and talking about how the lyrics of a Doors song changed his life, man.
Do you all believe that people like Aquinas or Bede were irrational or stupid? I guarantee either one of them would run intellectually roughshod over anyone in this thread.
If he were all-powerful, it shouldn’t take him any effort at all, should it?
Apparently, he doesn’t seem to give a shit.
The feeling’s mutual.
Instead, we get you. :rolleyes:
Oh, don’t be concerned; I also run roughshod over you intellectually. Of course, so do most retarded people. I’ll try harder to be convinced by your “NO YOU!” posts in the future.
Dumbass.