What a stupid thing to say.
Tricksies ! Tricksies ! It said it had the Precious in its pocketses, it did !
And?
Theists, as a group, don’t have a single coherent set of beliefs, either.
Yes, individual groups of theists, such as Catholics, or Shia, or Hindus, or Jews, may have a coherent set of beliefs, but theists as a whole do not.
Neither do left handed people. Nor blondes.
Why are you expecting something from atheists you do not expect from their god(s)-believing counterparts? As shown above, individual groups of atheists, much like their theist counterparts, may have a coherent set of beliefs. But as a whole, and just like their theist counterparts, atheists do not.
Deja vu all over again. :rolleyes:
What part of “THE ONLY THING ATHEISTS HAVE IN COMMON IS A DISBELIEF IN GODS” are you having so damn much trouble with? If some idiotic jackasses get it into their heads that they want to kill all people that disbelieve in gods, no “coherent set of beliefs” will dissuade them from doing so because they are idiotic jackasses.
In times of war, many of the differences you mention are blurred and people tend to think in black and white, with no shades. It is something I have seen with my own eyes.
Terrorist attacks are a form of guerrilla war in the eyes of certain extremists. Their murders are not fully embraced by Muslims, but some of them sometimes condone with the attacks and their morals are, at the time, stripped of any refinery. In those moments, it would be difficult for me to stand for an atheist even if I wanted to.
Please don’t - why confuse them further?
Shrek wasn’t the character in the movie that kept asking annoying questions that didn’t make any sense, so you might want to drop any movie reverences for the time being.
I have a simple answer for the OP.
"Are you so sure the GOD wants you to do this? Islam, Christianity and Judaism(and their many internal divisions) all share belief in the same Deity, the God of Abraham/Ibrahim is the God of Jesus/Issa although there are many distinct perspectives.
Are you so sure your actions are your Gods wishes that you are willing to gamble my life and your eternal life on what is at best a one in three chance of being right?"
This will, of course, not stop my executioners but to remind the class, German soldiers in WWI went into battle with “Gott Mitt Eins(God is with us)” on their belt buckles. Fat lot of good it did them.
Capt
And what group would you stand for?
Though it’s noisy and draws headlines, terrorism doesn’t work. I’ll take my chances in the nation with the greatest prosperiity and military strength the world has ever known, and they can pursue their loser’s strategy and consider atheists subhuman. Sounds like a sweet deal to me.
That being said, I think I’ve obtained what I was looking for.
I will copy paste all the points made in the thread, summarize and distill them. I thank people for the ideas expressed and I apologize for anything I’ve done wrong.
And my follow-up question is, of course, “Why should you care what GOD wants?”
I love standing for the underdog, but I usually stand for all humans. That’s all I can say and I say it from the heart.
I think you mean “refinement,” and this is strange because earlier you said atheists lack a firm moral code. That was supposed to be bad, but now you’re saying some Muslims lose their moral compasses and that’s something to be respected.
Why do I need to worry that someone who doesn’t understand what I think “won’t stand for me” if a terrorist wants to murder me? That says a lot more about you and your morality than it does about atheists.
Are you going to present your distillation here before sending it off? I for one would like to know what you plan on saying on our behalf.
It is probably the type of work that Roman leaders might have loved to read in the years preceding the fall of their empire.
There are also numerous articles on how the population bomb has failed to explode, for example. A glance at a simple graph would easily show the deflagration is here.
This doesn’t make any sense. You’re saying that you could explain to your “Muslim co-workers” why it is wrong for terrorists to kill Christians, but you can’t explain why it would be wrong for terrorists to kill atheists?
Is that it?
The reason you can’t is that you’re conflating two approaches.
On the one hand, you claim to believe that you should be able to explain to Muslims why it is wrong to kill atheists, based on a atheistic system of moral values.
The reason this will fail is that the Muslims will simply reject the axioms of the atheistic moral system you chose, and therefore your logical argument will fail.
But you’re perfectly capable of constructing an argument from Muslim, or Christian, or whatever-you-are-when-you’re-not-on-the-internetian moral axioms, yes? But you think this should fail because the atheists will not assent to the same moral axioms, and therefore be invalid?
Yes, it would be invalid logic.
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Socrates is mortal
Oh, snap, Socrates is really my dog! So the syllogism is invalid. But that doesn’t mean that my dog isn’t mortal, that’s denying the antecedent. My dog really is mortal even though the syllogism is false.
So atheists won’t agree that the moral axioms Muslims use to reason that murder is wrong are true. It does not therefore follow that murder is OK according to atheists, that is denying the antecedent the same as reasoning that my dog is immortal.
I can provide moral reasoning that murder is wrong from (various) atheistic premises, but Muslims won’t be persuaded because they will deny the premises. I can provide moral reasoning that murder is wrong from Muslim premises, but atheists won’t be persuaded because they will deny the premises. That doesn’t mean that according to atheists murder is good, or according to Muslims murder is good, that is a logical fallacy. A valid syllogism can be false if the premises are not true, and an invalid syllogism can be true, just because the conclusion does not follow from the premises does not mean that the premises are false or that the conclusion is false.
Wait - according to your own OP, your goal here is not to identify an argument that can be embraced by atheists, it’s to identify an argument that can be embraced by Muslims!
I mean refinement, I apologize for the mistake.
Earlier I said that atheists lack an absolute axiology and they tend to employ a relative one. And by no means have I implied that a relative axiology is inferior to an absolute one. We’re simply discussing things. On the other hand, relativism is regarded as inferior by an absolutist, and that’s the type of interlocutor I am sometimes supposed to deal with as I mention in the OP.
Refinement works in times of peace, especially for people who enjoy it. But I doubt people’s moral code knows as many shades as you can find on an artist’s palette. Religious fundamentalists work with thick brushes and in times of war they only know two tones: black and white. In times of war, their rivals react accordingly and everybody’s critical apparatus works in the safe mode, with the minimum of principles. One needs strong arguments to break through this axiological carapace. This is what I was referring to in the post above.
I said it would be difficult for me to stand for atheists in those moments, and by those moments I meant in times of war, especially religious wars the type of which I happen to be familiar with. In times of war civilians usually don’t commit suicide - I for one don’t think I would do it anyway.
Was that intended as a rebuttal to the paper I cited? If so, it’s not one.