god = dog
Are you dyslexic so you hate dog too?
Great Og, **MrDibble ** my friend, don’t you start!
Even assuming this is true, it doesn’t take the argument anywhere. At most it means religious people who believe in a god have derived some useful principles. They’ve also derived some appalling ones. Naturally they would now say that the good ones came from their god and the bad ones from elsewhere. There’s no evidence that they didn’t make up their principles themselves.
Okay, but I see no evidence it’s a probable consequence of atheism or even a common consequence of atheism and once we get into million-to-one shots, well…
Sure, no argument. It’s in our adult years that we can analyze the source of and need for our morals and many of us see no need to work a godhead in there. In fact, the many tales we’ve been told in childhood about the wellspring of morals being God or Jesus or whatever now seem pointless. That doesn’t instantly, or even gradually, turn us into amoral people, though, because by that stage we’ve pretty much adapted to social norms and no longer feel the need for religion-based reminders.
This is where I must point out that Der Trihs (I assume the source of this particular sentiment) isn’t let to slide, since he can be challenged in GD and Pit threads about him can be started, both without mod interference. Similarly, you can be challenged in GD and Pit threads about you can be started, both without mod interference. Exactly what “sliding” does he get that you don’t? And simple disagreement doesn’t count - if you find being challenged in GD or having a Pit thread about you started, then you’re frankly far too delicate for this board, where GD challenges and Pit threads are and always have been the norm.
Well, if any of those individuals take out memberships, they can complain.
So? Ignore it.
I’m fairly confident I can find passages promoting unkind behaviour in the New Testament, but again, if someone is expecting something of you you think is unfair, ignore them.
Scream bloody murder? A touch exaggerated, don’t you think? In how many of those atheist pile-ons have you played an active role? And if you want a religious pile-on, feel free to try to start one. Trouble is, on this particular board, the number of posters who will use religion as a weapon is a bit limited. There is no shortage of other boards where this is not the case, though, and a religious pile-on could go for a dozen pages or more.
I strongly suggest you read Lemur866’s post on the subject. I know you dismissed it out of hand, but I think you’d find it worthwhile.
Or you’d just dismiss it again, I dunno.
Do you not see a potential problem in taking something “to a total extreme”, and
Yeah, pretty much. How do you feel about people who are devastated by the moving of a sports team or the death of a celebrity?
I don’t hate god. Hating god is like hating Spiderman.
So million-to-one shots aren’t valuable conversation pieces? Only average topics are valuable?
Well I guess I don’t see automatized behavior as really being a moral individual. Morality tends to imply a bit of choice in the matter. Defaulting to conditioning doesn’t really seem moral to me.
Der Trihs doesn’t make a pile-on by himself, and I ignore 90% of his posts on every topic. The thing about a pile-on is that people manipulate you giving credibility to their position by responding into a chance to jump up and down on you. If I ignored all the people who were baiting and just responded to those that were debating, I suppose it would go more smoothly, but then I would be accused of side-stepping the issue until I finally gave in and gave that person attention, at which point they would proceed with the pile-on.
Yes, I find Paul to be rather irritating.
Hey just the other day, MrDibble was going on about death squads or some such.
Ok, I read it. Seemed pretty nihilistic to me, just nihilistic in a way that preferred the comfort of conformity. By the fact that a number of atheists alluded to that post as something worth looking at, I now surmise that maybe there is an inherently nihilistic thread in atheism. The idea that the universe is meaningless. I prefer to think that the universe is meaning in and of itself. Going along to get along just to suit other people’s emotional sentimentality is pretty sociopathic. Look at Dexter as an example. One need not be compelled to kill to be a sociopath. Sociopaths mimic the emotions of the society at large in order to fit into a world that they are alienated from. He may or may not be a sociopath, but that post seemed pretty sociopathic to me.
Sure, maybe some people don’t see the need to question everything when they lose faith in God. Maybe someone didn’t really lose faith in God, or never questioned it, they just woke up one day and decided that God was a worn out old shirt, unecessary. That maybe they never really had faith anyway.
It was a reference to this.
I hate Aquaman.
Biology and practicality define morality. Religion merely frames and rationalizes it. This can be said about any religion; the only significant real-world difference between Christianity and other religions is stuff like what kind of meat you’re allowed to eat.
Well, gosh, if you talk about the one-on-a-million atheist who turns into a sociopath and imply this is a typical or likely outcome, I simply can’t imagine how anyone would object.
Out of curiosity, how many theists are theists because their parents are theists? Is it just an astonishing coincidence that the one often shares the religious beliefs of one’s parents, or is there conditioning in effect? Is there a genetic difference between a Muslim and a Christian, one we might have observed had the infants been switched at birth?
Can I assume your earlier sweeping statement about the New Testament is subject to revision?
Actually, it’s no nihilistic at all. It’s quite wonderful and inspiring. The universe has lots of hydrogen, but heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Phosphorus are only formed in collapsing stars, in whose deaths these elements are scattered, to coalesce after an immensely long time into planets and the molecules we call “organic”, to randomly mix and compete and struggle and crawl from the muck and, after a billion years, we who are made of the stuff of the universe begin to contemplate the universe itself.
That’s not nihilistic at all. I find it beautiful; infinitely more so than any creation myth I’ve ever heard.
Thanks, I spent a good portion of my lunch break writing it. 
I’d never heard that type of description before; I’ve always thought of it as an emotion. Could you elaborate on what you mean?
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “Christian concept”. Of course it plays a major role in the teachings of Christ, but it’s not something that belongs solely to Christianity.
Imagine a 5 year old boy who lives in a place that has never been exposed to the concept of Christianity. You don’t think this impairs his ability to love his friends and family, right?
I think this is a common misconception about mental illnesses. A mental illness isn’t defined as a “deviation from the norm” - it’s essentially defined as thoughts or behaviors that impair a person’s ability to function in their everyday life. Emphasis should be placed on “their everyday life”, rather than “a normal everyday life”.
But the problem isn’t on the “science side” of psychology - it’s on the “human side”. The problem isn’t that tons of superfluous mental illnesses are defined, but rather that a lot of people are misdiagnosed with them.
I want to re-emphasize what I said earlier, WRT the impairment of functioning in someone’s everyday life. All of the mental illnesses you mention above are not synonymous with the “normal” behaviors that you associated them with. Of course, a lot of people are misdiagnosed, but that’s a completely separate issue.
There can be many explanations - the foremost probably being “human error”.
If you think the Christian thought wasn’t derived in turn from essentially secular Hellenistic philosophy, you’re very much mistaken. There’s nothing spontaneous or unique about Christian thought - see below.
Or even the same route. Hell, Buddha is a Christian saint, you know.
This collapses down to just Greek (with a sprinkling of Babylonian), IMO.
IMO, Socratic Method only works if the student is a sock puppet of the master. Otherwise it’s just an annoying debate tactic - The “you have to agree with my premises” tack of mswas is clearly not something we’re willing to play along with. That’s not how SM works. The key to using the method of ἔλεγχος effectively is to assert premises you interlocutor can’t refute, not simply insist that your premises be accepted for argument’s sake.
Plus they made Socrates drink poison for being an atheist and a rebel. mswas is no Socrates. He’s just a naughty boy.
I’d argue that, for me at least, the possibilities for my own morality were inculcated at an early age (and I was raised in an atheist household in a multicultural town) , added to by later mystical experience, and expanded on when I started reading Existentialists. And at various points, I made either rational or emotional choices on what to discard (God, homophobia, Deutoronomy, 5 Pillars) and what to acquire (pacifism, anticapitalism, atheism, 5 Precepts) from that whole grab-bag of possibilities. Most of that process happening in my 20s and 30s, but it’s ongoing. Definitely not set at an early age - I only discovered pacifism in my teens, Buddhism in my 20s and rediscovered atheism at 25.
So that’s at least two atheists out of the small number in this thread who came to their morals mostly rationally (with some emotion) later in life. Are you still going to insist it’s rare?
There can, in fact, be a group consensus morality. We call it Society.
Of course. But there are other tacks to take - showing their stated premises for feeling as they do are erroneous is one way. Like showing mswas that he’s wrong about the religious basis for morality.
A moral scale, yes, but why does it have to be objective?
HAven’t made that argument, I don’t think. But with you on empathy coupled with reason, so no argument there.
You say this as if Society is a monolithic entity rather than an emergent dynamic. We don’t choose Society, we create it. There is no “before Society” when we could choose.
Moral judgments aren’t subject to a completeness theorem, IMO. It can be both judge and judged. Why not?
The only way to discard Society is to live all alone on a desert island. Wherever there are two people, there is Society.
Not in the middle of another continuing argument, it isn’t. All it is, is confusing who you’re addressing.
Then address it in a different post, or after you’re done talking with me.
That’s not a strawman, that’s a mistake. I apologise.
Good thing I never said one had to be guided solely by emotion then. My point was more why rationality was the be-all and end-all of it, sorry if that was confusing. And there’s always “appeal to emotion” - it may be fallacious, but it’s often convincing!
No, I was being descriptive.
Still seeing theists here. Bad theists, but theists none the less.
I’ve been playing D’nD going on 30 years now. I don’t need it explained to me.
No, the writers constructed a Mary Sue society. Internal consistency and robustness weren’t really there, not even in Vault of the Drow. Erelhei-Cinlu had all the believability of Gor.
Cite?
Because your OP did not make any sort of case for Mao or Stalin being representative of your purported position and you have no legitimate reason to drag them into the discussion.
I see no evidence that you have argued anything tin this thread in good faith and only the presence of a very few sidebar disdcussions (in which you have not joined) have kept me from closing this thread.
I have no idea what you thought you were doing, here, with your strawman OP and your dismissal of nearly every poster–usually in an insulting manner–who has pointed out the serious flaws in your tissue-thin arguments, but if I do not see a serious effort on your point to construct a thoughtful, logical argument, this thread will soon be toast.
[ /Moderating ]
If any of the theists in this thoughtless mess of mischaracterisation are interested in learning possible mechanisms for the emergence of morality from nature, I’ll repeat the recommendation I made on the first page, which I assure you is worth
$3 and a mouse click.
As for whether morality is “objective”, well, how can it be if some people subjectively disagree on whether a given action is right or wrong? (And since theists seem to disagree just as subjectively between each other, religion therefore provides no more objective a morality. Even if gods exosted, their wishes would only ever be interpreted subjectively.)
That is not to say that morality cannot be studied objectively, of course, nor that if enough subjects set forth the consequences of their subjective morality, that this could not easily be confused with “objectivism”.
People are wrong all the time. This is like saying, ‘if it is objectively true that the earth is round, how could anyone ever think it was flat?’
I think we covered this in fair detail. The question is not concerning religious bases for morality. The question is, is there any real basis for morality in an atheistic world? Because, as you no doubt realize, the argument you present above is easily flipped, and is equally valid - if religiously based morality is invalid because it is subjective, then atheist morality is equally invalid because it is equally subjective. And if atheist morality can be valid (in any sense) even though it is based on arbitrary principles, then religious morality can be equally valid, even though it is based on equally arbitrary principles.
Atheists cannot establish that their principles are any better than religion. All attempts to do so bog down almost at once in begging the question, ad hominems, and simply asserting their first principles over and over.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - Congratulations again on the new little one.
Behavior, yes, but not morals. I’ll elaborate more in a sec.
Here’s the thing: you appear in this paragraph to be laboring under the mistaken impression that we obtain “morals” as children. As you noted above, we learn “behavior” as children, but actual morals come much later. In short, children who haven’t learned to reason fully are not moral beings. We can shape their behavior, but learning to do the right thing because it is the right thing takes time and introspection. A young child is no more a moral being than a wild tiger. Trainable, yes, but not a moral being. I never claimed that I came out of the womb with a fully formed moral code, nor even that I graduated from high school as a moral being. I did and do claim, however, that if your only claim to moral rightness is divine decree, then your morality is still at the level of a trained child.
Society can shape our behavior, but morality comes from within. And there are indeed moral systems that consider, from different perspectives, the wishes of society; that is why I suggested that you do some reading on the fundamentals. Familiarize yourself with that which seems to offend you. Hell, I took 2 1/2 years of religion classes and read the Bible front to back; why don’t you at least take a peek into what the “other side” is thinking?
If your morality is such that the only thing restraining you from wicked behavior is the threat of punishment, then you are a sociopath. In other words, if the threat of punishment is removed, how do you act? If your answer is, “Go nuts and do whatever I want,” you are in dire need of moral growth. Or, as it was so eloquently put on a restaurant placemat I read once, “Morality is what you do when no one’s looking.”
Having faith is something I ordinarily don’t mind a bit in a person. What I do object to is blind faith. I can respect someone’s decision if they’ve put some thought into their religion, maybe even doubted a bit, and worked out in their mind that this makes sense for them. Now, if a person just goes through the motions because their parents did, blindly accepts what they’re told, and goes along with anything that’s “in the book” (or even worse, what someone else just tells them is "in the book), I find that pathetic and sad. Do some introspection, and then if you arrive at your faith, good for you. I looked, and for me faith wasn’t the answer. I feel that deserves some modicum of respect. And it irks me greatly when God’s Warriors insult my decision, as though they are in some way superior simply because they have a lower threshold of gullibility and the firm belief that if they do not question, they are saved.
I ask questions, and I try to figure out what’s real and what’s right. And any God who would punish me for that doesn’t deserve my respect.
And equally, religionists cannot establish that their principles are any better than the principles of atheists.
Sounds fair to me.